Monte Carlo Fallacy

Afterword

The interdisciplinary field of problem gambling is researched mainly by psychology, at least in what concerns etiology of and development of the problematic gambling behavior. From a psychological standpoint, the main cause of the MCF is a belief in a sort of “law of small numbers,” leading to the erroneous belief that small samples must be representative of the larger population.
            Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed in 1971 that the MCF is a cognitive bias produced by a psychological heuristic called the representativeness heuristic, which assumes that people evaluate the likelihood of occurrence of an event by assessing a degree to which it is similar in essential characteristics to its parent population, and it reflects the salient features of the process by which it is generated.
            This remained the dominant psychological view of the causes of the MLC, which, when fine-tuned to employ mathematical and statistical concepts, leads to the three causes that we dealt with previously. Yet, the correction of the MLC must employ the entire complexity of the phenomenon, which also has a mathematical and an epistemological dimension, as do other gambling cognitive distortions also. However, psychological factors also influence the correction of this fallacy.
            Additionally, non-cognitive psychological factors are involved in the causes and correction not only of the MCF, but of all the other gambling cognitive distortions. In general, in the field of problem gambling strong credit is given to the psycho-social factors, which are assumed to be the most influential factors for the development of a problematic gambling behavior.