De-Biasing Financial Biases: Experimental Evidence from South Africa

We test the effectiveness of experiential learning as a debiasing tool against lotteries and gambling, where individuals often overestimate small-scale probabilities. Simple dice games were developed to highlight the concept of probability with respondents themselves experiencing the difficulty of simultaneously rolling identical numbers across an increasing number of dice. The variation in number of tries it took for respondents to roll identical numbers offers additional randomness in the intensity of treatment. Our outcome measures include immediate, intermediate, and long-term choices in lottery offers (by a third party), and actual spending on lotteries and gambling measured through surveys.