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