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Showing posts with the label random

Do Winning Streaks Really Exist?

You got back to your car just in time to dodge the parking ticket.  You were the 100th customer at the supermarket and qualified for free groceries.  And your son just got into the college of his choice, all in one day. On a winning streak ?  Not likely, say experts.  Humans have a well-documented tendency to see winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are, well, random, according to newswise.com. We're not alone.  Monkeys do it, too.  Researchers find that monkeys also share our unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks. "The results suggests that the penchant to see patterns that actually don’t exist may be inherited—an evolutionary adaptation that may have provided our ancestors a selective advantage when foraging for food in the wild, according to lead author Tommy Blanchard, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester," newswise reports.  This inborn tendency to feel that w...

It's True: Success Breeds Success

What do you think success breeds?  If you said, more success, you're probably pretty successful. That's the answer, all right.  If you're good enough to do something well once, you can do it again and again, says a new study . In a study that used website-based experiments to uncover whether the age-old adage that “success breeds success” is a reality, researchers found that "early success bestowed on individuals produced significant increases in subsequent rates of success, in comparison to non-recipients of success," according to newswise.com. The findings  suggest that early success that is not based on merit may produce inequality in achievement among similarly qualified individuals. But the study also found that greater amounts of initial success failed to produce greater subsequent success.   Researchers  tested the success-breeds-success hypothesis by randomly allocating “successes” to individuals.  "In each scenario, we found that early s...