Categories
Categories
Philipp Cox
by on August 23, 2021
181 views
Hindsight error when placing sports bets
Research in neuroeconomics, the science that studies decision-making, has proven that profit-seeking activities. Sports betting https://www.techtalkies365.com/sports-betting-in-india/. Affects the human brain in the same way as drug intoxication, while situations that entail financial losses are regarded as deadly dangers ... So how can bettors maximize their chances of financial survival and profit by balancing euphoria and doom?
The main method for securing long-term profits in sports betting is the use of a strategy with a positive mathematical expectation and regular betting. It sounds simple, but often difficulties arise due to the fact that we think too much.
Cognitive Bias: Curse or Blessing?
In 1972, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman made a world-class discovery worthy of the Nobel Prize: they introduced the concept of cognitive biases - systematic deviations from rational behavior in the formation of judgments. The research findings in this area (judgment and decision making) are obviously applicable to the area of betting, since the study of how the mind works opens up wide perspectives for us.
Psychologists are aware of many self-created misconceptions. Looking down, we overestimate the height, which makes us feel afraid of falling.
Unfortunately, these mental tricks, also known as heuristics, will not help much in situations where objectivity is key (such as when placing bets).
Cognitive biases, which can be caused by both mental noise and the influence of the social environment, as well as emotional motivation and errors in information processing, will inevitably affect the decision-making process when placing bets on sports. They are easily processed in the brain, but they lead to serious systematic errors.
But there is still a chance for salvation, if you believe the words of the famous German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who owns the statement: "Our weaknesses no longer harm us when we know about them."
These cognitive biases include hindsight bias, which manifests itself as a tendency to perceive events that have already occurred as obvious (this phenomenon is also called "I knew it would be so", or retrospective determinism). Psychology professor Thomas Gilovich was the first to investigate the phenomenon of hindsight error in gambling.
In an experiment aimed at identifying the reasons why American sports bettors continue to use ineffective strategies, he found that players' judgments about their own successes and failures affect their subsequent bets.
In his first experiment, he found that after a soccer game that was determined by luck (for example, a wrong decision by a referee that had a significant impact on the outcome), neither the winning nor the losing players would change their bets.
The losers explained their defeat by the action of random forces, while the winners did not take them into account, since the result itself was important to them. Gilovich, however, came to the conclusion that bettors tend to take success for granted, but failure forces them to scrutinize the reasons for this outcome.
In the second experiment, Gilovich tried to find out to what extent past luck could influence the future betting decisions of players, for which he told the participants of the experiment about a bright manifestation of luck that dramatically influenced the outcome of a recent match on which they were placing bets. In this case, it was found that previously losing players tend to re-believe in the strength of their teams, while the faith of the winning players in their favorites also did not diminish.
In his final experiment, Gilovich found that players who lost due to bad luck (which they considered the main reason for their defeat), like those who won (regardless of the reason for this victory - luck or skill), tend to significantly increase the size of subsequent bets (in comparison with original rates). *
Based on this, we can conclude that the tendency to take success for granted, and consider defeats as victories that simply for some reason could not be realized, can lead to excessive confidence in players in their own betting skills and a decrease in the chances of success. the future. Gamblers, like many people under other circumstances, are not willing to admit they can be wrong.
Be the first person to like this.