“Can People Behave ‘Randomly’?: The Role of Feedback”, 1986 ():
Experimental psychologists generally maintain that people cannot behave randomly.
The present experiment asked students to generate random sequences of two numbers on the keyboard of a computer terminal.
At first, all subjects’ sequences differed statistically-significantly from random, thereby replicating the findings of the literature. But when given feedback from 5–10 statistical descriptors, the subjects learned to generate sequences that were indistinguishable, according to these statistics, from computer-generated random numbers.
Random-like behavior can therefore be learned.