Regular and random judgements are not two sides of the same coin: Both representativeness and encoding play a role in randomness perception

Abstract

The overalternating bias is that people rate sequences with an excess of alternation as more random than prescribed by information theory. There are two main explanations: the representativeness heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky Cognitive Psychology, 3, 430-454, [19]) and the implicit encoding hypothesis (Falk & Konold Psychological Review, 104, 301-318, [8]). These hypotheses are associated with different reaction times predictions. According to the encoding hypothesis, reaction times should increase as the complexity of the sequence increases, whereas the representativeness heuristic predicts fast reaction times only for more complex sequences that appear more random. We asked participants to guess the generating source of pairs of sequences of dichotomous elements in two different conditions: selecting the string generated by a random source or selecting the string generated by a nonrandom source. Results suggest that both the encoding strategy and the representativeness heuristic have a role in randomness perception and that the two criteria may have a different weight when determining the randomness versus the regularity of a string. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-021-01934-9.