How to Pick a Winner: A Psychological Trick to Improve the Odds
By PsyBlog, June 18, 2013
This post has been viewed 2,394 times.
Does thinking too specifically about a bet make you more likely to lose?
I’m not, as they say, a betting man; but if I were I’d put down the form book and spend my time studying a new paper by Yoon et al. (2013) published inPsychological Science.
The Korean researchers are fascinated by the question of whether thinking more carefully about a bet can actually make you less likely to win.
In their first test of the idea they looked at 1.9 billion bets placed on baseball and soccer through a Korean company called “Sports ToTo”. They wanted to see how people did when betting just on who won compared with when they tried to predict the exact score.
Obviously getting the final score right is harder than just predicting the outcome; but when you guess the score, you are also predicting the outcome.
What they found was that across all the games, when people made a bet on the score they won 42.2% of the time, but when they just tried to predict the outcome they were right 44.4% of the time.
