What is the hot hand fallacy in simple terms?

It's believing a player who has made several shots in a row is "in the zone" and will make the next one too. The 1985 study argued this belief didn't match the actual records.

So is the hot hand not real?

Not necessarily. A 2018 reanalysis found a statistical bias in the original study, which strengthened the view that a small hot hand effect may really exist. Researchers still point out that people tend to exaggerate it.

Hot Hand Fallacy

🧠 Psychology By CampusDown Wiki Editorial Team Last updated October 27, 2026

The hot hand fallacy is the tendency to overestimate how likely a streak of successes or failures is to continue, as when people believe a basketball player who has made several shots in a row is more likely to make the next one. Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky introduced it in 1985, showing that in real shooting records the success rate did not rise after streaks. In 2018 Miller and Sanjurjo identified a statistical bias in the original analysis, prompting a reassessment suggesting the hot hand may be real.

Contents

1. The 1985 study and the discovery of an illusion
2. Broader evidence and theoretical accounts
3. The Miller–Sanjurjo reanalysis
4. FAQ
5. References

The 1985 study and the discovery of an illusion

Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky (1985) found in surveys that most basketball fans and players believed a player's shooting percentage rises after a streak of makes. But when they analyzed field goal records from the Philadelphia 76ers, free throw records from the Boston Celtics and a controlled shooting experiment with Cornell players, success rates after streaks of makes did not differ significantly from those after streaks of misses. They concluded that people misread the runs that naturally occur in random sequences as meaningful patterns. Tversky and Gilovich (1989) reaffirmed the result in response to critics, and Gilovich (1991) presented it as a prime example of how we come to hold unfounded beliefs. It is the mirror image of the gambler's fallacy, which holds that a streak is about to end.

Broader evidence and theoretical accounts

Camerer (1989) found evidence that point spreads in basketball betting markets slightly overvalued teams on winning streaks, and Koehler and Conley (2003) found no hot hand in the NBA Three-Point Contest. Croson and Sundali (2005) observed casino gamblers increasing their bets after wins. Reviewing two decades of work, Bar-Eli, Avugos and Raab (2006) concluded that the findings were mixed. Ayton and Fischer (2004) showed that people tend to expect a hot hand in processes involving intention, such as human skill, and the gambler's fallacy in random devices such as roulette. Rabin and Vayanos (2010) modeled how people who believe in the law of small numbers start from the gambler's fallacy and end up believing in a hot hand, and Wilke and Barrett (2009) offered an evolutionary account in which the belief is an adaptation to natural environments where resources are clumped.

The Miller–Sanjurjo reanalysis

Miller and Sanjurjo (2018) proved that the original method contained a subtle statistical bias. When you compute the share of successes immediately after a streak of successes in a finite sequence, the expected value falls below the overall success rate even for a perfectly random shooter. For example, if you flip a coin four times and compute the share of heads that follow a heads, the expected value is about 0.4, not one half. After correcting for this bias, a significant hot hand effect appeared even in Gilovich and colleagues' Cornell data. Bocskocsky, Ezekowitz and Stein (2014) showed that once shot difficulty is controlled for, players on streaks take harder shots, and Green and Zwiebel (2018) found a hot hand effect in Major League Baseball batting data. Many researchers now hold that the hot hand can exist but that people may still overestimate its size. The episode illustrates the subtleties of the law of large numbers and sample-based estimation.

FAQ

What is the hot hand fallacy in simple terms?: It's believing a player who has made several shots in a row is "in the zone" and will make the next one too. The 1985 study argued this belief didn't match the actual records.
So is the hot hand not real?: Not necessarily. A 2018 reanalysis found a statistical bias in the original study, which strengthened the view that a small hot hand effect may really exist. Researchers still point out that people tend to exaggerate it.

Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26

References

Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., & Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17(3), 295–314.
Tversky, A., & Gilovich, T. (1989). The cold facts about the "hot hand" in basketball. Chance, 2(1), 16–21.
Camerer, C. F. (1989). Does the basketball market believe in the "hot hand"? American Economic Review, 79(5), 1257–1261.
Koehler, J. J., & Conley, C. A. (2003). The "hot hand" myth in professional basketball. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 25(2), 253–259.
Ayton, P., & Fischer, I. (2004). The hot hand fallacy and the gambler's fallacy: Two faces of subjective randomness? Memory & Cognition, 32(8), 1369–1378.
Croson, R., & Sundali, J. (2005). The gambler's fallacy and the hot hand: Empirical data from casinos. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 30(3), 195–209.
Bar-Eli, M., Avugos, S., & Raab, M. (2006). Twenty years of "hot hand" research: Review and critique. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 7(6), 525–553.
Wilke, A., & Barrett, H. C. (2009). The hot hand phenomenon as a cognitive adaptation to clumped resources. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30(3), 161–169.
Rabin, M., & Vayanos, D. (2010). The gambler's and hot-hand fallacies: Theory and applications. Review of Economic Studies, 77(2), 730–778.
Bocskocsky, A., Ezekowitz, J., & Stein, C. (2014). The hot hand: A new approach to an old "fallacy". MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
Miller, J. B., & Sanjurjo, A. (2018). Surprised by the hot hand fallacy? A truth in the law of small numbers. Econometrica, 86(6), 2019–2047.
Green, B., & Zwiebel, J. (2018). The hot-hand fallacy: Cognitive mistakes or equilibrium adjustments? Evidence from Major League Baseball. Management Science, 64(11), 5315–5348.
Gilovich, T. (1991). How We Know What Isn't So. New York: Free Press.

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This article was last updated on October 27, 2026. It is based on widely recognized original works and textbooks; when citing it in a paper, please check the original sources listed in the references.