clustering illusion

Chance sequences can seem too lumpy, and are thus dismissed as non-chance (clustering illusion).

The clustering illusion and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy may both be treated as relatives of precision bias.

It is related to the clustering illusion, which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist.

A related bias is the clustering illusion, in which people under-expect streaks or runs in small samples.

Tversky and Kahneman argued that sequence 2 appears "representative" of a chance sequence (compare to the clustering illusion).

Biases mentioned include confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, illusory superiority and the clustering illusion (the misperception of random data).

The clustering illusion is central to the "hot hand fallacy", the first study of which was reported by Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky.

Related biases are the illusion of control which the clustering illusion could contribute to, and insensitivity to sample size in which people don't expect greater variation in smaller samples.

The representativeness heuristic is also cited behind the related phenomenon of the clustering illusion, according to which people see streaks of random events as being non-random when such streaks are actually much more likely to occur in small samples than people expect.

In support of this view, critics cite instances of fraud, flawed studies, and cognitive biases (such as clustering illusion, availability error, confirmation bias, illusion of control, magical thinking, and the bias blind spot) as ways to explain parapsychological results.

The clustering illusion refers to the tendency to erroneously perceive small samples from random distributions to have significant "streaks" or "clusters", caused by a human tendency to underpredict the amount of variability likely to appear in a small sample of random or semi-random data due to chance.