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Is the hot-hand phenomenon real or fake? Research reveals the truth and will open your eyes!
In the sports world, especially basketball, the hot hand phenomenon has been hotly discussed. The theory, which holds that when a player succeeds on consecutive shots, the success rate of subsequent shots will increase, is an idea that seems intuitive but has been controversial in the scientific community.
The hot hand phenomenon refers to people's belief that after success, the probability of achieving the next success will increase. This psychological bias is especially obvious in basketball.
The phenomenon was first published in 1985 by research by Thomas Gilovich, Amos Tversky and Robert Vallone. The paper, "The Hot Hand in Basketball," questions whether players' "hot hands" actually exist, and analyzes scientific data to suggest that players experience success or failure on subsequent shots. Probabilities do not influence each other.
These studies examined the role of randomness in players' shooting success rates. They found that the results of each shot taken by a player are independent, and the subsequent success rate will not be changed by the previous results. This raised doubts about the hot-hand phenomenon and prompted many further studies.
The view put forward by Gilovich and others is that humans lack a correct understanding of randomness and are prone to confirmation bias, causing people to mistakenly believe that the hot-hand phenomenon is real.
However, the results of these early studies have been challenged in subsequent studies. Some emerging research, especially Miller and Sanjurjo's reanalysis, pointed out that the original research had biases in data processing, and that the hot-hand phenomenon may actually be valid in some cases. In fact, they found evidence of "hot hands" in some sports, and the startling discovery sparked a new wave of enthusiasm in academia.
According to different research results, the situation in which the hot-hand phenomenon occurs is quite complex. Some players demonstrated a clear hot-hand effect in specific situations, while others failed to demonstrate the effect during the discussion. This has led scholars to reconsider the subtle relationship between psychological bias and athletic performance.
The researchers found: "In every game, a successful winning streak does not necessarily increase the chance of success the next time; however, this may vary among individual athletes."
In addition to sports activities, the phenomenon of hot hands is also widespread in other areas of life, such as consumer behavior and gambling. When people feel the upward trend of a certain stock in the stock market, they often make buying decisions based on the hot-hand phenomenon, which is sometimes irrational because they ignore the randomness of market operations.
In gambling, the hot hand phenomenon contrasts with the gambler's fallacy, showing a common psychological characteristic of misunderstanding random events. Psychologists have found that when people face possible random events, they tend to fall into excessive trust in past successes and thus miss rational judgments.
“Human beings are wired to look for patterns in all kinds of perceptual and conceptual data, which leads to misinterpretations of random events.”
Recent research has taken a more diverse view of the hot-hand phenomenon, with voices of support and skepticism intertwined. The key question is: does the hot-hand phenomenon really exist? Is it a bias in psychological cognition or a real issue with sports performance? These questions not only inspire countless debates in academia, but also make us constantly reflect on our judgments in daily life.
With the publication of different studies and the increase of data, will there be more comprehensive conclusions in the future that will enable us to understand this phenomenon more deeply?
