The gambler's fallacy occurs because people assume that chance or randomness is self-correcting. Assuming the roulette wheel is fair, the probability of black is unchanged. This fallacy may be due to people's misunderstandings of conditional probabilities. A related fallacy is the hot hand fallacy . Gilovich finds that people see streaks when the events do not deviate from a random process.
People think that events repeat less often than they actually do.
This causes them to view random events as being significant or meaningful when they really aren't. If you knew which side of the coin was facing up and exactly how much force was applied to the flip, you would know how the flip would turn out. Take out a coin and flip it 100 times, recording the outcomes in the text box below. It will probably fail one of the randomness tests. Research has shown that humans are not capable of responding randomly when told to do so.