What is Hot Hand?

The hot hand phenomenon is a belief that successful outcomes become more likely after a streak of successes. The idea has been around for centuries and has been applied to everything from sports to gambling and even investing. It’s commonly associated with basketball, where players tend to experience hot streaks of consecutive successful shots.

The hot hand is closely related to the representative heuristic, a bias identified in studies by behavioral economists. The representative heuristic refers to the tendency of people to associate a pattern of outcomes to a particular event. For example, if a person throws a coin several times and gets heads each time, they might assume that future tosses are more likely to also be heads.

The hot hand fallacy is based on the same logic. After a string of successes, people tend to attribute the results to something other than random chance and assume that future successful outcomes are more likely.

Despite these tendencies, the truth is that the hot hand may not be a fallacy at all. While research suggests that the bias leads to flawed decisions in certain contexts, some studies have indicated that the hot hand is at least partially real when it comes to certain sports. For example, one analysis found that players in basketball and soccer were more likely to score after a successful play, suggesting a real hot hand effect.

Ultimately, the hot hand phenomenon is an interesting feature of human behavior. Although the bias may lead people to make flawed decisions in certain contexts, studies suggest that when it comes to certain sports, the hot hand may be a real effect. Whether you believe in the hot hand or not, it is undeniable that some degree of luck is involved in achieving and maintaining success.