The “Hot Hand” Is Not a Myth
In a recent interview for the web series Hot Ones, where guests answer tough questions while eating super-spicy chicken wings, pro basketball superstar Stephen Curry was asked about a sports psychology study from the 1980s. The subject of the study was the “hot hand effect,” the idea that players’ successes come in streaks—dependent on some mysterious inner quality that ebbs and flows—and when a player’s hand is hottest and they’re “in the zone,” it can feel almost like they can’t miss.
Curry knows a thing or two about a hot hand. He holds the NBA record for making at least one three-pointer in 268 consecutive games. Following a practice one day, he sank 105 three-pointers in a row. In the Hot Ones interview, Curry said the authors of the study “don’t know what they’re talking about at all.” When Curry totaled 60 points in one game, he said, “It’s literally a tangible, physical sensation of all I need is to get this ball off my fingertips and it’s going to go in.”
The study, “: On the Misperception of Random Sequences,” was written in 1985 by eminent psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky. They allegedly demonstrated through an analysis of basketball shooting data that the hot hand was a myth. Recently
