Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. Imagine your hours into a late
Speaker 1: night poker match. Hold up in the basement of a
Speaker 1: sketchy watering hole where tensions are rising. You know you
Speaker 1: should quit while you're ahead, but you just can't bring
Speaker 1: yourself to leave any possible winnings on the table. The
Speaker 1: streak has gone on so long it's like you can't lose,
Speaker 1: except you do. One bad card deals you a killer blow.
Speaker 1: The spell is broken and your hot hand is gone.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately it never existed in the first place. Researchers have
Speaker 1: taken great pains to prove that the hot hand bias
Speaker 1: is exactly that a bias. It's humans innate predisposition that
Speaker 1: makes us believe we see patterns, including winning or losing
Speaker 1: streaks where none exist, especially when preservation or gain are involved.
Speaker 1: Now we know that monkeys have the same superstitious bias too.
Speaker 1: Oh and they really love to gamble. It seems we
Speaker 1: species have more in common than us to the of
Speaker 1: our DNA. During a study by researchers at Clarkston University
Speaker 1: and the University of Rochester, ess monkeys played a fast
Speaker 1: paced computer game with built in rewards. Correctly guess the
Speaker 1: next step in the pattern, get a treat. However, even
Speaker 1: when the sequence was random, the monkeys gambled like they
Speaker 1: were on a winning streak, showing a false belief in
Speaker 1: their run of good luck. Despite being given multiple opportunities
Speaker 1: to rehearse a different scenario, the monkeys stuck to the
Speaker 1: patterns they perceived to be winning ones. Gambling monkeys hell
Speaker 1: bent on a hot hand is one thing. Figuring out
Speaker 1: why they share our pension for these patterns is another.
Speaker 1: A researcher's point to the odds of finding food in
Speaker 1: a monkey's natural habitat. If a monkey finds a plump
Speaker 1: beetle under tree bark once, it's a clue that he
Speaker 1: should check nearby trees too. If he finds another beetle nearby,
Speaker 1: it reinforces a pattern that the monkey will probably repeat
Speaker 1: the next time he's hungry, even though he may never
Speaker 1: find another beetle the next twenty times he looks. It
Speaker 1: seems neither monkeys nor humans ever really make decisions that
Speaker 1: are free from bias, and we don't even recognize that
Speaker 1: we're doing it. Take the process by which some humans
Speaker 1: decide to invest in a particular stock. A stock that
Speaker 1: rises one day is never guaranteed to rise the next,
Speaker 1: or ever again. Yet we believe that if a stock
Speaker 1: went up once, it will do it again, and so
Speaker 1: surely that will be the most logical investment. This belief
Speaker 1: in winning and losing streaks may not be solely a
Speaker 1: product of life experiences, as was previously thought, Because we
Speaker 1: share the superstition with monkeys. Scientists think there may be
Speaker 1: a genetic component to it and hope that further research
Speaker 1: could lead to new approaches to treating gambling addiction, insight
Speaker 1: into decision making theory, and more. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Laurie L. Dove and produced by Tristan McNeil. For
Speaker 1: more on this and tons of other psychological topics, visit
Speaker 1: our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.