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...