Hot-Hand Fallacy

The hot hand, sometimes called the hot-hand fallacy or hot-hand phenomenon, refers to the belief that a person who has recently succeeded at a task involving skill and chance, most famously a basketball player who has just made several shots in a row, is more likely to succeed on the next attempt than their overall average would predict. Early academic research found no statistical evidence for real streaks beyond what chance would produce and treated the belief as a cognitive fallacy, but later research using more sophisticated statistical methods has questioned that conclusion, finding mixed results across sports and contexts. More recent findings suggest that only a small subset of players show a genuine hot hand, that the effect where it exists tends to be small in magnitude, and that it may apply mainly to shots taken from a fixed position, such as free throws, rather than to shots taken from varying positions during play.