Why Players are much better at Applying Hindsight than Foresight?

We continue to map the delusions and biases of our consciousness, which are the most pernicious for fans of gambling. An important place among them is the ability to justify their choice and to give it a rational character after it turned out to be erroneous due to a number of circumstances external to the subject of choice. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as hindsight bias, or judgment in hindsight.

Systematic misconceptions of consciousness were revealed in 1974 by two American psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the article “Making Decisions in Conditions of Uncertainty: Rules and Prejudices”. In 2002, Kahneman received the Nobel Prize, and the practical results of their scientific work began to seep into popular scientific literature. Nassim Taleb in the book “The Black Swan” and other works abundantly quotes these authors, including examples of experiments in which subjects ridiculously rationalized their deliberately spontaneous actions.

There is a class of patients who have a broken connection between the left and right cerebral hemispheres. For psychiatrists and scientists, such patients are worth their weight in gold, for they make it possible to find out how the hemispheres work separately, what their specialization is. Modern science believes that the left hemisphere has the function of pattern recognition and interpretation, while the right recognizes the new and makes up a picture of the elements of the mosaic. When such patients are suppressed by the left hemisphere, leaving only the right one active, and then asking to take any action-raise your finger or take a shovel-an interesting thing happens. After the patient is again activated the left hemisphere, suppressing the right with the help of low-frequency electromagnetic pulses, he will necessarily find a rational explanation for his generally aimless act. The explanation will be from the series: “I took a shovel to check it for weight”.

We have the same thing in a slightly more veiled form. Thomas Gilovich in 1983 conducted a series of three experiments in order to find out why gamblers involved in gambling can’t stop, although in addition to losses, they do not bring anything else. He aimed to find out how the previous experience of the game and the own interpretation of the results have an effect on gambling behavior.

In the first experiment, Gilovich managed to find out that a football match in which the outcome of the meeting was largely determined by random fluctuations, such as for example, of judicial errors, had almost no effect on both the winners and the losers. The winners did not begin to worry about doubts, because they were in the category of those who are not judged, and the losers found a weighty explanation for what happened. If the referee saw that Maradona scored a goal with his hand, then the result of the match would be completely different, and if Zidane did not cheer Materazzi at the 2006 World Cup, France could become the world champion in football for the second time. Maybe so: if yes, if only.

In the second experiment, Gilovich deliberately and in a rather convex form presented to the subjects all the fateful accidents that determined the fate of previous matches. This has not changed anything. All that the researcher discovered in the first experiment, in the second, manifested itself with renewed vigor.

Finally, in the third experiment, measurements were made not only on those football matches where the random factor played a significant role, but also on the others: where the outcome of the meeting was natural. Here the picture has changed a little.

We can conclude that players who had a bad experience in the last game, but could explain the loss by chance, perceived the event as a possible, but accidentally missed win. She raised her next bet. Also, the bet was raised by the winning players, regardless of the element of randomness in the previous match. Like all other people, it’s hard for players to admit they are wrong. For football matches, this can become a mass phenomenon, since football is more prone to accidents than the rest of the team games.

When dealing with the prejudices of our consciousness, it must be remembered that it is self-confident to believe that we are able to overcome them. This also applies to backdating judgments. We set ourselves a more modest goal of being informed, forewarned, and therefore also armed against unconscious prejudices that prevent us from making informed decisions. When the time comes to accept the bitter truth in its pure form, it will be superfluous to recall these tricks of our consciousness.