Cognitive Biases · CB-23
Believing a person 'on a streak' is more likely to succeed on the next attempt — a belief that turns out to be more complicated, and less simply wrong, than early research claimed.
The belief that a person who has experienced a run of successes in an activity involving skill and chance (basketball shooting, for instance) has a higher probability of continued success on the next attempt than base rates alone would predict — originally identified as a pure cognitive illusion, though later methodological work has meaningfully complicated that original conclusion.
Originally documented by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky in a 1985 study of basketball shooting data, which found no statistical evidence that players' shots were more likely to go in after a streak of makes — contradicting widespread belief among players, coaches, and fans.
The Mechanism
A genuinely contested case in psychology's own research history
This is one of the rare cases where the 'debunking' itself got debunked — Miller and Sanjurjo's 2015 reanalysis found a subtle selection bias in how the original 1985 study calculated conditional shooting percentages, and correcting for it revealed a real, if modest, hot-hand effect the original study had statistically obscured.
01 · THE ORIGINAL STUDY'S METHOD HAD A GENUINE, SUBTLE STATISTICAL FLAW
Not a simple case of good science versus popular myth
Miller and Sanjurjo identified that conditioning on 'the previous three shots were makes' in a finite sequence introduces a subtle selection bias that mechanically understates the true conditional hit rate — a genuinely non-obvious statistical error that took three decades to be identified and corrected.
02 · THE CORRECTED EFFECT IS REAL BUT SMALL, NOT THE DRAMATIC 'STREAKINESS' PLAYERS BELIEVE IN
Nuance matters — this isn't a full vindication of folk belief
Even after the methodological correction, the measured hot-hand effect is modest — nowhere near as large as many players, coaches, and fans intuitively believe, meaning the original folk belief was still substantially overstated even if not entirely illusory.
03 · IT'S A GENUINELY VALUABLE CASE STUDY IN INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY
A well-known 'debunked belief' turned out to be partly right after all
The hot-hand story is now frequently cited in discussions of scientific self-correction and epistemic humility — a widely-accepted, textbook example of a cognitive bias underwent a legitimate, technically sophisticated revision decades later, a useful reminder that even well-replicated findings deserve periodic re-examination.
Where It Fails / Inversion
Where it fails / inversion
Treating the corrected finding as full vindication of the strong popular belief ('he's unconscious right now, he can't miss') overstates the actual, modest effect size found in the corrected analysis — the accurate position is a real but small effect, not the dramatic streakiness intuitively believed by most fans and players.
How To Use It
Worked example · deciding whether to keep feeding a 'hot' player the ball
A basketball coach noticing a player has made several consecutive shots faces a genuinely nuanced empirical question, not a simple myth to dismiss — the corrected research suggests a small increase in the player's true shooting percentage may be real, but decisions should still weigh matchup, fatigue, and shot selection rather than assuming a dramatic, self-sustaining hot streak.
How to use it
When someone claims to be 'on a streak,' resist both the naive belief that the streak guarantees continued success and the reflexive dismissal that all streaks are pure illusion — the honest answer, per the corrected research, is a real but modest effect that's easy to overstate in either direction.
See Also