This mistake is usually called belief in the "law…
This mistake is usually called belief in the "law of small numbers."" Note that this law of small numbers is not really a law; it is a fallacy.
— from Takeoff Into Chaos · Practical Uncertainty: Useful Ideas in Decision-Making, Risk, Randomness, and AI by Hossei
In the book
We are forever inventing a "balancing force of the universe" — the gambler's certainty that a run of bad luck must now be due to turn — but with independent events there is no such force; the coin does not remember how it last landed. We trust tiny samples as if they were laws, when a handful of tosses is no law at all, whatever we pretend. The Nobel laureate Herbert Simon put the deepest version of it: a human being, seen as a behaving system, is actually rather simple — most of the bewildering complexity of our conduct is just the reflection of the complicated environment we are flying through, the same trap we fall into when we credit an ant with elaborate cunning that proves to be nothing but the shape of the ground it crossed. — Takeoff Into Chaos