The relationship of the detection of unpredictable visual binary sequences and selected personality measures

To a certain extent the everyday incidents of life occur in a chaotic and orderless fashion. But in such an unpredictable world people must predict such events even if they present themselves at random. This suggestion by Restle (1961) is especially relevant to an experiment by Pattie (1964a) in the area of human binary prediction. This study seemed to indicate that individuals search for and believe in orderly, predictable solutions in apparently orderless, random situations. Ss were given a randomized deck of 200 index cards, of which 75% displayed an easily discriminable symbol with the remaining 25% bearing another symbol. Ss were instructed that the deck was well-shuffled. After attempting to anticipate each card, it was found that over half the Ss admitted that they thought some sort of pattern existed in the sequence of the cards