Many intuitions evolve into folk beliefs that are shared and persist within a community. These offer dubious cues to influence decision-making. We examine a natural setting where folk belief can be empirically tested: the sport of greyhound racing. This community maintains that greyhounds drawn in Trap 4 – the “coffin trap” – are disadvantaged and ought to be avoided by bettors. Using data from 78,595 greyhound performances in Great Britain, we empirically test the accuracy of this enduring intuition. Controlling for pre- and within-race conditions, our results support the community intuition. The “coffin trap” significantly disadvantages greyhound, and this is not reflected in market odds. This finding is robust across races and empirical estimators. As there is no scientific basis for the origin of this belief, these results substantiate the success of a culturally surviving intuition. We conjecture that a valid cue has emerged from learning over time within the community.
Butler et al. (Fri,) studied this question.