Randomness and Coincidences: Reconciling Intuition and Probability Theory

Abstract

We argue that the apparent inconsistency between people's intuitions about chance and the normative predictions of probability theory, as expressed in judgments about randomness and coincidences, can be resolved by focussing on the evidence observations provide about the processes that generated them rather than their likelihood.This argument is supported by probabilistic modeling of sequence and number production, together with two experiments that examine judgments about coincidences.

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