This chapter began with a table showing the contrast between
what people think random events are like and what they are
really like. Here we will explore some of the reasons that
people have these erroneous beliefs. It has been well documented
that most people—even those who understand that any result of a
series of tosses of a fair coin is a random sequence—make errors
in their judgements about random sequences. The following is a
list of some possible explanations for this tendency. The focus
here is not on superstitious beliefs, but on cognitive processes
and experiences that might lead a person to hold faulty beliefs.
For a more complete examination of erroneous beliefs in
gambling, see Wagenaar (1988); Ladouceur and Walker (1996);
Kahneman and Tversky (1982); Toneatto (1999); and Toneatto,
Blitz-Miller, Calderwood, Dragonetti, and Tsanos (1997). People
will often judge the coin-tossing sequence of H, H, H, H, H, H
as being less random than H, T, H, H, T, H, even though the
probability of obtaining each o