Harry Porter wrote:
I suspect that what's involved in the OP's perception that you see
deuces turn up more frequently in DW is two things: you're just much
more preoccupied with deuces and, because you hold dealt deuces more
frequently, you see more deuces in the final hands - reinforcing the
perception if it should form.
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This notion, nicely stated by you here and by you and others earlier,
has some (admittedly tangential) support in an area of study in
experimental psychology. Without boring you with an explanation of
why the studies were initiated, let me describe briefly the kind of
experiments conducted and what they've found. I'm too lazy to dig up
the references, but the topic they address was dubbed "illusory
correlation."
Here's the deal. A pool of words is selected. Some of the words are
related to one another in meaning, but unrelted to other words in the
pool. The words are presented in pairs over a large number of
trials. Every word is paired the same number of times with every
other word - that is, the reality is that each word is equally likely
to appear with every other word in the pool. After people are
presented with this long series of word pairs, they are presented with
each word alone, and asked to pick out the words (if any) that were
most frequently paired with that one word. People reported seeing
more frequent pairings of semantically related words than those whose
meanings were unrelated. It's a robust effect that has been
replicated in many experiments (sometimes using pictures instead of
words). If one is "pre-set" to see occurrences as more salient, they
are likely to see those occurrences as occurring more frequently than
other similar events.
I love deuces wild VP - and 2s become very salient to me. At one
point I shared that "hunch" that deuces appear more frequently in DW
games than in others like JoB. So I did do the counting that someone
suggested earlier. I played for an hour, making a hashmark for every
deuce that I saw. I played for another hour making the hashmarks for
every ace. The frequencies were almost identical. I did this just
for myself, not to prove a point to anyone else, so I ignored all the
"slop" in this little study (possible difference in the number of
hands played, possible "misses" of the target card since I was also
interested in hitting payoffs; etc) - but it was enough to convince
just me that I was seeing something akin to the illusory correlations
about which I had read many years earlier.
Or is it that I saw no illusory correlations because that is what I
expected? naaahhh.
Bob in San Antonio
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