The representativeness heuristic has been invoked to explain two opposing expectations--that random sequences will exhibit positive recency (the hot hand fallacy) and that they will exhibit negative recency (the gambler's fallacy). We propose alternative accounts for these two expectations: (1) The hot hand fallacy arises from the experience of characteristic positive recency in serial fluctuat...

Human agents happen to judge that a conjunction of two terms is more probable than one of the terms, in contradiction with the rules of classical probabilities—this is the conjunction fallacy. One of the most discussed accounts of this fallacy is currently the quantum-like explanation, which relies on models exploiting the mathematics of quantum mechanics. The aim of this paper is to investigat...

The conjunction fallacy refers to situations when a person judges a conjunction to be more likely than one of the individual conjuncts, which is a violation of a key property of classical probability theory. Recently, quantum probability (QP) theory has been proposed as a coherent account of these and many other findings on probability judgment "errors" that violate classical probability rules,...

The gambler's fallacy was examined in terms of grouping processes. The gambler's fallacy is the tendency to erroneously believe that for independent events, recent or repeated instances of an outcome (e.g., a series of "heads" when flipping a coin) will make that outcome less likely on an upcoming trial. Grouping was manipulated such that a critical trial following a run of heads or tails was g...

People suffering from the hot-hand fallacy unreasonably expect winning streaks to continue whereas those suffering from the gamblers' fallacy unreasonably expect losing streaks to reverse. We took 565,915 sports bets made by 776 online gamblers in 2010 and analyzed all winning and losing streaks up to a maximum length of six. People who won were more likely to win again (apparently because they...

In the present article we consider the inverse fallacy, a well known cognitive heuristic experimentally tested in cognitive science, which occurs for intuitive judgments in situations of bounded rationality. We show that the quantum formalism can be used to describe in a very simple and general way this fallacy within the quantum formalism. Thus we suggest that in cognitive science the formalis...

Two experiments investigate the conjunction fallacy (judging that conjunctive probabilities are higher than the probabilities of the constituents). The conjunction fallacy was much less for P(E|C) tasks than for P(C|E) tasks. The results are explained in terms of the way people interpret the conditional probabilities. We argue that people prefer to reason from cause to effect (cause-to-effect r...

From Charles Darwin to Edward Wilson, evolutionary biologists have attempted to construct systems of evolutionary ethics. These attempts have been roundly criticized, most often for having committed the naturalistic fallacy. In this essay, I review the history of previous efforts at formulating an evolutionary ethics, focusing on the proposals of Darwin and Wilson. I then advance and defend a p...