How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

by Jordan Ellenberg

He had what basketball fans call “the hot hand”—the apparent inability to miss a shot, no matter how great the distance or how fierce the defense. Except there’s supposed to be no such thing. In 1985, in one of the most famous contemporary papers in cognitive psychology, Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky (hereafter GVT) did to basketball fans what B. F. Skinner had done to lovers of the Bard. They obtained records of every shot taken by the 1980−81 Philadelphia 76ers in their forty-eight home games and analyzed them statistically. If players tended toward hot streaks and cold streaks, you might expect a player to be more likely to hit a shot following a basket than a shot following a miss. And when GVT surveyed NBA fans, they found this theory had broad support; nine out of ten fans agreed that a player is more likely to sink a shot when he’s just hit two or three baskets in a row. But nothing of the kind was going on in Philadelphia.