Hot hand fallacy

The "hot-hand fallacy" (also known as the "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand") is the allegedly fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success with a seemingly random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts. The concept has been applied primarily to sports, such as basketball. While previous success at a skill-based athletic task, such as making a shot in basketball, can change the psychological behavior and subsequent success rate of a player, researchers for many years did not find evidence for a "hot hand" in practice. However, later research has questioned whether the belief is indeed a fallacy. More recent studies using modern statistical analysis have shown that there is evidence for the "hot hand" in some sporting activities.

The fallacy was first described in a 1985 paper by Amos Tversky, Thomas Gilovich, and Robert Vallone. The "Hot Hand in Basketball" study questioned the theory that basketball players have "hot hands", which the paper defined as the claim that players are more likely to make a successful shot if their previous shot was successful. The study looked at the inability of respondents to properly understand randomness and random events; much like innumeracy can impair a person's judgement of statistical information, the hot hand fallacy can lead people to form incorrect assumptions regarding random events. The three researchers provide an example in the study regarding the "coin toss"; respondents expected even short sequences of heads and tails to be approximately 50% heads and 50% tails. The study proposed two biases that are created by the kind of thought pattern applied to the coin toss: it could lead an individual to believe that the probability of heads or tails increases after a long sequence of either has occurred (known as the gambler's fallacy); or it could cause an individual to reject randomness due to a belief that a streak of either outcome is not representative of a random sample.

The first study was conducted via a questionnaire of 100 basketball fans from the colleges of Cornell and Stanford. The other looked at the individual records of players from the 1980–81 Philadelphia 76ers. The third study analyzed free-throw data and the fourth study was of a controlled shooting experiment. The reason for the different studies was to gradually eliminate external factors around the shot. For example, in the first study there is the factor of how the opposing team's defensive strategy and shot selection would interfere with the shooter. The second and third take out the element of shot selection, and the fourth eliminates the game setting and the distractions and other external factors mentioned before. The studies primarily found that the outcomes of both field goal and free throw attempts are independent of each other. In the later studies involving the controlled shooting experiment the results were the same; evidently, the researchers concluded that the sense of being "hot" does not predict hits or misses.

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