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The Hot Hand: Miracle, Mastery, or Myth?
By Dr. Robert M. Adams, Department of Psychology, Eastern Kentucky University
Popular understanding of basketball and many other sports includes a belief that a player may occasionally have a "hot hand."
An article by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky (1985) contested the existence of a "hot hand." They had examined successive shots by NBA basketball players and found that the concept of a "hot hand", strings of successive shots made when a player is "hot", was not supported by careful statistical analysis of the sequences of shots provided by team records. The sequence of successive shots made did not differ in length from sequences that would be expected by chance alone.
Their conclusion appeared to be so far from the truth as I, a believer in the "hot hand", knew it that I sought a way to refute their conclusion.
My logic was that their data not supporting the existence of a "hot hand" was due to looking only at the sequences of shots without looking at how far apart in time the shots occurred. A shot taken soon after making a shot, my reasoning went (Adams, 1992), was more likely to be made than a shot taken after an interval long enough for the "hot hand" to dissipate. I timed the intervals between shots in 19 videotaped NBA games and found that the interval between a shot made and a shot made (n=372) was slightly longer than the interval between a shot made and a shot missed (n=394). The difference was not significant, but if making a shot is an indication that the player might be in the "zone", and the "zone" dissipates over time, longer intervals should lead to a lower likelihood of a shot being made. They did not, and my data did not support the existence of a "hot hand."
The hot hand / momentum / zone / streaks issue is far from resolved, and clear demonstrations of its existence are rare and controversial. Gilden and Wilson (1995) have provided evidence of streaks in golf putting. I have found (in an article published in the International Journal of Sport Psychology) what I believe to be evidence of the phenomenon in the play of professional tournament pool players. And a debate stemming from the Gilovich et al. study has appeared in the 1989 issues of the statistical journal Chance.
As a follow-up on the issue of momentum, I have looked, in a paper presented at the Southeastern Psychological Association last year, at the success of using a called time out to break the momentum of a racquetball match. Timeout is typically called when a player has had a bad run of rallies, and, indeed, the following points are more likely to show an upturn. If, however, after a bad run of rallies, he does not call a timeout, the following points show just as strong an upturn. What is happening, I think, is what is known to statisticians as "regression toward the mean", which predicts that any performance that is, statistically, anomalously high or low is likely to be followed by performance that is in the direction of the norm for that individual (or player or team). The effectiveness of a time out thus may well be another case of what Gilovich et al. called the "hot hand", a "cognitive illusion".
References:
Adams, R.M., (1992). The "Hot Hand" Revisited: Successful Basketball Shooting as a Function of Intershot Interval. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 74, 934.
Adams, R.M. (1996). Momentum in the performance of professional pocket billiards players. International Journal of Sport Psychology, 26, 580-587.
Gilden, D.L., & Wilson, S.G. (1995). Streaks in skilled performance. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. 21, 260-265.
Gilovich, T, Vallone, R., & Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295-314.
The racquetball paper was presented at the meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, March 1997, Atlanta.
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