Do athletes ever have a “hot hand”? Sometimes it seemed that the Boston Celtics’ Larry
Bird could never miss a basket, or the New York Rangers’ Wayne Gretzky or Argentina’s
Diego Maradona a shot on goal. Sporting commentators see these long streaks of
consecutive successes and proclaim that the athlete has a “hot hand.” Yet according to
psychology professors Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and the late Amos Tversky, this
is a misperception of reality. They point out that if you flip a coin long enough, you will
find some very long series of consecutive heads. The psychologists suspect that sporting
commentators, short on insightful things to say, are just finding patterns in what amounts
to a long series of coin tosses over a long playing season. They propose a more rigorous
test. In basketball, they look at all the instances of a player’s baskets, and observe the
percentage of times that player’s next shot is also a basket. A similar calculation is made
for the shots immediately following misses. If a basket is more likely to follow a basket
than to follow a miss, then there really is something to the theory of the hot hand.