Roberts Russell, Hastie Reid, Todorov Alexander
Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
PNAS Nexus. 2025 Aug 26;4(8):pgaf237. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf237. eCollection 2025 Aug.
We report on five experiments studying people's ( > 12,000) responses to a prototypical random process: predicting the outcomes in a sequence of five fair coin tosses. "Success" rates in making predictions followed the binomial distribution, and randomly assigned participants to zero to five success experiences, capturing the entire distribution of possible performance outcomes without deception. We found that more successful predictions led to more optimistic expectations of future performance and an increased propensity for risk-taking behaviors, whereas more unsuccessful predictions led to more pessimistic expectations and risk-averse behavior, demonstrating the tendency to believe that there is a signal in performance predicting random sequences of events. Inference from performance was stronger for participants who changed their predictions more often, suggesting that it is more likely to emerge when participants detect a spurious correlation between their behavior and the experienced outcomes. The findings could not be explained by distorted beliefs about the nature of the outcome-generating process, poor knowledge of probability, or risk attitudes, and were unaffected by the presence of performance-related rewards.
我们报告了五项实验，这些实验研究了超过12000人对一个典型随机过程的反应：预测五次公平抛硬币的结果序列。预测的“成功”率遵循二项分布，并且将参与者随机分配到零至五次成功经历中，在没有欺骗的情况下涵盖了可能的表现结果的整个分布。我们发现，更成功的预测会导致对未来表现更乐观的预期以及冒险行为倾向增加，而更不成功的预测会导致更悲观的预期和规避风险的行为，这表明人们倾向于相信在预测随机事件序列的表现中有信号存在。对于那些更频繁改变预测的参与者来说，从表现中得出的推断更强，这表明当参与者察觉到他们的行为与所经历的结果之间存在虚假关联时，这种推断更有可能出现。这些发现无法用对结果产生过程的本质的扭曲信念、对概率的了解不足或风险态度来解释，并且不受与表现相关的奖励的影响。
