We sing the praise of good displays: How gamblers bet in casino roulette

This paper tells a tale of serendipity, due to a felicitous figure. Our message is that a good figure can sometimes do more than display well those features of one’s data that one intends to highlight, by also leading to new and unexpected insights. For some years now, the first author has been interested in position effects in simultaneous choice, and particularly in the so-called middle bias. By simultaneous choice, we mean choice from simultaneously presented options (as in store displays) rather than sequentially presented options (as in “American Idol”). By position effects we mean influences on choice that can be attributed to position. A case in point is middle bias, which is the greater tendency to choose
items when they are placed in the middle of a spatial display, such as the documented tendency for guessers in multiple-choice tests to gravitate towards middle answers, or that of supermarket shoppers to pick the middle cans from an array of identical cans displayed on the shelf.