The Myth of the Hot Hand — Revisited
January 28, 2026 · NBA · 6 min read
For thirty years, the hot hand was the poster child of cognitive bias — the textbook example psychologists trotted out to prove humans are terrible at understanding randomness. "People think they see streaks in basketball shooting," the professors would chuckle, adjusting their elbow patches, "but it's just an illusion." It was tidy, elegant, and — as it turns out — probably wrong. Oops.
In 2015, economists Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo demonstrated that the original 1985 Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky study contained a subtle but devastating statistical bias. When you condition on a streak of makes to test whether the next shot is more likely to go in, you introduce a selection bias that suppresses the measured probability. Correct for this, and — surprise — shooters actually do hit at a slightly higher rate when "hot."
So the Hot Hand Is Real?
Yes. Kind of. With a massive asterisk.
The effect is real but small — on the order of 2-3 percentage points. So if a player normally shoots 45% from three, they might shoot 47-48% when on a genuine hot streak. That's statistically significant but practically modest. It's not going to turn Kyle Anderson into Steph Curry. It's more like turning Steph Curry into slightly-more-annoying Steph Curry.
Why It Matters (And Doesn't)
The hot hand debate matters because it's a case study in intellectual humility. The original "hot hand fallacy" finding was accepted as gospel for three decades. It appeared in every intro psych textbook. It was the go-to cocktail party fact for people who wanted to sound smart about probability. And it was based on a flawed analysis that took 30 years to catch.
| What People Believed | What's Actually True |
|---|---|
| Hot hand is pure illusion | Small but real effect exists |
| Streaks are always noise | Some streaks reflect real performance variation |
| Coaches are irrational to "feed the hot hand" | Coaches are... slightly less irrational than thought |
The lesson isn't "trust your gut about streaks." The lesson is "even peer-reviewed findings from prestigious researchers can be wrong, and intellectual certainty is usually unwarranted." Which, frankly, is the whole thesis of this platform.
Thirty years of smugly correcting people at parties about the hot hand fallacy, only to find out the hot hand is real. The universe has a sense of humor, and it's aimed squarely at overconfident academics.
Related: Is Clutch Hitting Real? · Why RBIs Are a Terrible Stat