Graduation Year

Spring 2013

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Psychology

Reader 1

Gabriel I. Cook

Terms of Use & License Information

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License

Rights Information

© 2013 Hye Min Shin

Abstract

The study looked at how misperceptions of randomness (the gambler’s fallacy or the hot-hand fallacy) would show differences in self-serving-bias through different levels of perceived control. In order to investigate this relationship between misperceptions of randomness, self-serving bias, and perceived control, the study manipulated perceived control by varying who threw the coin (experimenter/participant) and by showing a skill prime to some participants. Thus, in the experiment, participants either saw a skill prime or not by random assignment. Afterwards, the participants predicted an outcome, rated the confidence of the prediction, then the participants would throw a coin for half of the trials while the experimenter would for the other trials. Due to little variability of the self-serving bias, the analysis could not test the hypothesis. However, the study found that other variable such as confidence was able to predict the misperception of randomness when the participants threw the coin.

This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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