Koehler, J. J. & Conley, C. A. (2003). The Hot Hand Myth in Professional Basketball. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 25, 253-259.

ABSTRACT

The “hot hand” describes the belief (particularly among basketball fans) that an athlete’s performance increases beyond his or her base rate following a string of successes. Despite much research on this phenomenon and the related psychological momentum phenomenon, debate persists about whether athletes elevate their performance following a successful performance run. In this paper, we take criticisms and limitations of previous research into account and offer new evidence. In Study 1, we present an experimental survey that shows that, contrary to an implicit assumption of past research, people do not always equate hotness with a short runs of success in basketball. The time frame within which the runs occur, as well as the difficulty of the shot, influence people's judgments about whether a streaking athlete is hot or not. In Study 2, we apply these findings by searching for evidence of the hot hand in four National Basketball Association (NBA) Long Distance Shootout contests. Traditional sequential dependency runs analyses, individual level analyses, and a review of spontaneous outbursts by contest announcers about players who are "on fire" failed to reveal evidence of a hot hand. We conclude that the present data help clarify the common meaning of hot hand, and provide evidence against the ubiquity of the performance phenomenon.

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