Beliefs about the "hot hand" in basketball across the adult life span (original) (raw)
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Motivated reasoning in the prediction of sports outcomes and the belief in the "hot hand
Cognition & emotion, 2016
The present paper explores the role of motivation to observe a certain outcome in people's predictions, causal attributions, and beliefs about a streak of binary outcomes (basketball scoring shots). In two studies we found that positive streaks (points scored by the participants' favourite team) lead participants to predict the streak's continuation (belief in the hot hand), but negative streaks lead to predictions of its end (gambler's fallacy). More importantly, these wishful predictions are supported by strategic attributions and beliefs about how and why a streak might unfold. Results suggest that the effect of motivation on predictions is mediated by a serial path via causal attributions to the teams at play and belief in the hot hand.
Does Framing the Hot Hand Belief Change Decision-Making Behavior in Volleyball?
Purpose: Previous discussions of the hot hand belief, wherein athletes believe that they have a greater chance of scoring after two or three hits (successes) compared to two or three misses, have focused on whether this is the case within game statistics. Researchers have argued that the perception of the hot hand in random sequences is a bias of the cognitive system. Yet most have failed to explore the impact of framing on the stability of the belief and the behavior based on it. Method: The authors conducted two studies that manipulated the frame of a judgment task. In Study 1, framing was manipulated via instructions in a playmaker allocation paradigm in volleyball. In Study 2, the frame was manipulated by presenting videos for allocation decisions from either the actor or observer perspective. Results: Both manipulations changed the hot hand belief and sequential choices. We found in both studies that the belief in continuation of positive or negative streaks is non-linear and allocations to the same player after three successive hits are reduced. Conclusions: The authors argue that neither the hot hand belief nor hot hand behavior is stable but rather both are sensitive to decision frames. The results can inform coaches on the importance of how to provide information to athletes.
The Hot Hand in Basketball: Fallacy or Adaptive Thinking? The Hot Hand as Fallacy
In basketball, players believe that they should "feed the hot hand," by giving the ball to a player more often if that player has hit a number of shots in a row. However, analyzed basketball players' successive shots and showed that they are independent events. Thus the hot hand seems to be a fallacy. Taking the correctness of their result as a starting point, I suggest that if one looks at the hot hand phenomena from Gigerenzer & Todd's (1999) adaptive thinking point of view, then the relevant question to ask is does belief in the hot hand lead to more scoring by a basketball team? By simulation I show that the answer to this question is yes, essentially because streaks are predictive of a player's shooting percentage. Thus belief in the hot hand may be an effective, fast and frugal heuristic for deciding how to allocate shots between member of a team.
Purpose: Previous discussions of the hot hand belief, wherein athletes believe that they have a greater chance of scoring after 2 or 3 hits (successes) compared with 2 or 3 misses, have focused on whether this is the case within game statistics. Researchers have argued that the perception of the hot hand in random sequences is a bias of the cognitive system. Yet most have failed to explore the impact of framing on the stability of the belief and the behavior based on it. Method: The authors conducted 2 studies that manipulated the frame of a judgment task. In Study 1, framing was manipulated via instructions in a playmaker allocation paradigm in volleyball. In Study 2, the frame was manipulated by presenting videos for allocation decisions from either the actor or observer perspective. Results: Both manipulations changed the hot hand belief and sequential choices. We found in both studies that the belief in continuation of positive or negative streaks is nonlinear and allocations to the same player after 3 successive hits are reduced. Conclusions: The authors argue that neither the hot hand belief nor hot hand behavior is stable, but rather, both are sensitive to decision frames. The results can inform coaches on the importance of how to provide information to athletes.
The effect of perceived streakiness on the shot-taking behaviour of basketball players
European journal of sport science, 2014
We examine behavioural changes of basketball players arising from the hot-hand belief and use data of 1216 National Basketball Association games to measure the effect of cold and hot streaks on three proxies of shot difficulty. We find that the more consecutive shots players make (miss), the more difficult (easier) shots become along the three dimensions. Furthermore, most players' performance seems to improve during hot streaks because they attempt more difficult shots while no significant decrease in shooting accuracy takes place. This might explain why most previous studies could not find empirical evidence for the hot-hand belief in basketball when considering in-game field goal shooting.
Hot hand belief and hot hand behavior: A comment on Koehler and Conley
Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2004
In our comment on findings on the "hot hand" belief, we want to emphasize the different conclusions that can be drawn from their results by applying the concept of ecological rationality. The choice of environmental contexts and structures imposes constraints on possible interpretations of the results obtained. Differentiating between the cognitive and behavioral levels of the phenomenon seems analytically useful, particularly if practical recommendations to professionals are to be made. The implications of Koehler and Conley's data, new evidence, and the relationship between the perceived streaks of players and their base rates are discussed with the aim of developing empirically founded recommendations to professionals in sports, especially in real game situations.
PLoS ONE, 2011
The long lasting debate initiated by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky in 1985 is revisited: does a ''hot hand'' phenomenon exist in sports? Hereby we come back to one of the cases analyzed by the original study, but with a much larger data set: all free throws taken during five regular seasons (2005=6{2009=10) of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Evidence supporting the existence of the ''hot hand'' phenomenon is provided. However, while statistical traces of this phenomenon are observed in the data, an open question still remains: are these non random patterns a result of ''success breeds success'' and ''failure breeds failure'' mechanisms or simply ''better'' and ''worse'' periods? Although free throws data is not adequate to answer this question in a definite way, we speculate based on it, that the latter is the dominant cause behind the appearance of the ''hot hand'' phenomenon in the data.
Guessing imagined and live chance events: Adults behave like children with live events
British Journal of Psychology, 2009
Electronic mail may be sent to e.j.robinson@warwick.ac.uk Guessing live and imagined chance events 2 Abstract An established finding is that adults prefer to guess before rather than after a chance event has happened. This is interpreted in terms of aversion to guessing when relatively incompetent: After throwing, the fall could be known . Adults (N = 71, mean age 18;11; N = 28, mean age 48;0) showed this preference with imagined die-throwing as in the published studies. With live diethrowing, children (N = 64, aged 6 and 8 years; N = 50, aged 5 and 6 years) and 15year-olds (N = 93; 46) showed the opposite preference, as did 17 adults. Seventeenyear-olds (N = 82) were more likely to prefer to guess after throwing with live rather than imagined die-throwing. Reliance on imagined situations in the literature on decision-making under uncertainty ignores the possibility that adults imagine inaccurately how they would really feel: After a real die has been thrown, adults, like
The “hot hand” revisited: A nonstationarity argument
The "hot hand belief," that a basketball player would experience elevated performance for a certain period of time, during which consecutive shots are made in streaks, has been suggested to be a "cognitive illusion," because, from the basketball-shooting data, no significant evidence has been found to reject the simple binomial model. The present study raises concerns about the statistical methods used to support this claim. It is argued that nonstationarity may manifest as a residual effect when the changes in shooting accuracy are interrupted by activities such as shot selection and defense effort. Reanalyses of the field goal data from the earlier study showed that the serial correlation varied substantially between positive ("hot hand shooting") and negative ("over-alternation shooting"). In addition, a nested model comparison revealed that when a player's shooting accuracy fluctuated substantially in a short period of time, it was unlikely to be detected by the binomial model. Our results suggest that paying special attention to streak patterns in the hot hand belief may be an adaptive strategy in detecting changes in the environment.