Luck & Movies
With each passing year the unpredictability of film revenue is supported by more and more academic research.
But if picking films is like randomly tossing darts, why do some people hit the bull’s-eye more often than others? Because even random events occur in clusters and streaks.
Imagine this game: We line up 20,000 moviegoers who, one by one, flip a coin. If the coin lands heads, they see “X-Men”; if the coin lands tails, it’s “The Da Vinci Code.” Since the coin has an equal chance of coming up either way, you might think that in this experimental box-office war each film should be in the lead about 10,000 times. But the most probable number of lead changes is zero, and it is 88 times more probable that one of the two films will lead through all 20,000 customers than that each film leads 10,000 times.
The fairness of fortune is expressed not in alternations of the lead but in the symmetry of probabilities: Each film is equally likely to be the one that grabs and keeps the lead.
Even in situations like this, in which we know there is no “reason” that the coin flips should favor one film over the other, psychologists have shown that the temptation to concoct imagined reasons to account for skewed data and other patterns is often overwhelming.
One of the questions Daniel Kahneman liked to put to his subjects concerned the sequences in a coin toss. For instance, in a toss of seven coins, which of the following head-tail combinations is more likely to occur, HHHHTTT or HTHTTHT? Most people erroneously believe that the first sequence is less likely than the second, but the two sequences — and all other sequences of seven heads and tails — are equally probable.
Sociologists noticed, while observing gamblers in Las Vegas, that dice players act as if tossing the dice is a game of skill. They throw them softly if they want low numbers, or hard for high ones.
Ellen J. Langer and Jane Roth recruited Yale undergraduate psychology majors to watch an experimenter flip a coin 30 times. One by one, the subjects watched the coin flips and tried to guess how the coins would land. They found that, although the students were surely aware that a coin toss is a random event, those who experienced the early winning streaks developed an irrational attitude of confidence that they were “good” at intuiting the coin toss. 40% said their results would improve with practice; 25% even reported that, if in the future they were distracted during the test, their performance would suffer.
And most of the students assessed themselves as being better than their counterparts.
“Meet Hollywood’s Latest Genius,” by Leonard Mlodinow