Magical Thinking

Let’s do a little mental exercise. We’re going to flip a coin. I’ll flip this coin 20 times and you’ll note whether it comes up heads or tails on a little piece of paper with a pen that I’ll lend you. Now we’re going to make it interesting and we’re going to bet on the outcome of the next coin flip.

We’ll keep it friendly and I’ll let you bet a buck. If you’re right, I’ll give you a dollar. If you’re wrong, I get your dollar. So, shall we play a game?

Further, let’s say when we reach the end of 20 flips, you look down to total up the coin flips. There’s a reasonable chance that that coin came up 10 times on heads and 10 times on tails. But, the world often not being that simple, odds are even better that it came down 11-9 in favor of heads or 12-8 in favor of tail. Chance being what it is, despite the reality that any given coin flip has a statistically equal chance to come up heads or tails, it’s human nature to look for patterns to inform our future choices.

So, with that scenario, most folks would decide that it’s basically random chance which side will come up, so there’s no preferred choice.

But, let’s change things up. Let’s say that we flip 20 times and you note the outcome. At the end of those 20 flips, you look down and you see 18 heads and 2 tails. Again, I ask you to risk a buck to predict which side will come up. What would you choose? Would you:

a. Bet your buck on heads because it’s been correct 90% of the time?

b. Bet your buck on tails because, really, what are the odds that it could come up heads again?

c. Toss out both a. and b. and recognize that none of the prior 20 events have anything to do with the outcome of the next coin flip?

Now, assuming I haven’t found a way to cheat a coin flip or that I’m using a rigged coin, C is the only logical outcome but I suspect the odds are pretty good that most folks would tend to choose one of the first two options. I believe human beings want to believe in magical thinking like this.

I’ve talked before about playing a Game Night with role-playing games and dice play a large part in determining the outcome of events: Do I hit the Gnome, do I successfully climb the rope ladder, can I convince the guards that they’re needed elsewhere? The group I play with is made up entirely of very rational folks, engineers and rational thinkers. Having said that, I still see evidence of magical thinking, even in myself!

One person I play with spent extra money for dice that are supposedly “equal access”. They have sharper edges and something about them supposedly make the odds of any given face coming up even across the entire dice. Another guy will spend a few minutes rolling the dice before we get started, to “warm them up”. There also seems to be some serious issues around using someone else’s dice, as if something about the prior roller will stick to the dice and affect future rolls.

I know that when it comes to dice rolling, I have a tendency to believe that I roll poorly more often than I roll well. I know how odds work, I know that I’ve got no “dice curse” on me, yet I don’t think of myself as lucky when it comes to such things. In fact, as a player, I’ve developed a reputation for sub-par rolling and all the fun that follows from failing to accomplish what I set out to do because of the dice.

This is entirely magical thinking and I’m a rational person who believes in science and causality, yet I struggle with the idea that I don’t inherently roll poorly more often than I roll well. Where does that thinking come from?

I like to make fun of my fellow players when they get upset at the idea of someone else touching their dice or when they warm up their dice or try and roll out the bad rolls before it counts, but they persist and as fun as it is to give them crap about it, at some level, I know I’m guilty of that thinking as well.

I have a friend who likes to develop “systems” for when he goes to Vegas. One example would be walking by a roulette wheel where they have a sign that shows the color of that past (let’s say) 10 results. Based on what he sees on that sign, he may walk up and bet whether the ball will come up red or black.

There’s even a name for this. It’s called the Gambler’s Fallacy and it occurs when there is a belief that if there is a run of a particular outcome (10 heads in a row in our coin tossing example), then it will happen less frequently in the future. In other words, that what has come before will affect what’s about to happen.

Pretty much any gambler can be heard to talk about a hot table or a hot dealer or a hot machine. All of these are founded in the notion that individual future events are somehow part of a larger pattern of events. If we can just see the pattern…

Sometimes we extend this in to our lives. Certain people are “lucky” in life and others are unlucky. Some people think that if a bad event happens, it’s just par for the course because that’s the hand that fate or life has handed them.

I think it comes from the natural human desire to see patterns where they don’t exists. This is called Pareidolia.

Think about seeing a shape in a cloud, or the satellite photo of the Face on Mars, the Man in the Moon, Canals on Mars, Jesus in the shadow on a building or the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich. As a side note, that grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 at auction in 2004, which speaks volumes about our desire to see patterns where they don’t exist.

Human beings love our patterns. This might come from early brain development where pattern matching might help our ancestors pick out a larger, faster predator that might be eyeing them as food or perhaps our predator brains making it easier to find prey that’s trying to hide from us. That means it’s in a deep, dark and much older corner of the brain and that sort of thing has a tendency to swamp the more recently evolved rational part of our brain.

As I said, I know I’m guilty of this on occasion. I’ve been known to purchase a lottery ticket, sometimes known as a “tax on people who don’t understand statistics”.

Being a rational adult who is reasonably well educated, what would cause me to use my hard-earned cabbage to purchase a ticket where the odds of me winning the prize are on par with me being hit by lightning? Twice.

Here’s my rational, which doesn’t have to work for anyone else but me. Occasionally tossing $5 at a lottery ticket means that between when I purchase it and when I don’t win, I can spend anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple of hours thinking about what I’d do if I did win the lottery. Lives I would try to change, including my own, things I would do, things I could do that I can’t reasonably consider normally because I have to get up and go to work and do my job. So, for me, it’s an occasional $5 mental vacation. Cheap at twice the price! Certainly I don’t recommend it on a regular basis and I absolutely don’t think it’s a good plan if you couldn’t take that same $5 and set fire to it, but as that’s a federal offense and, frankly, less enjoyable, my $5 mental vacation is a better plan.

I don’t imagine I’ll be able to even conquer that tendency towards magical thinking. As I said, I believe it’s deep down in our brains in a part that’s been around much longer than the more recent veneer of rational thinking. I guess my goal is to try to limit its impact on me to things that aren’t negative or are at least less negative. Meanwhile, I’m going to go out and look at the clouds and make a toasted cheese sandwich and see if anyone shows up.