The Day Steph Curry Made 105 3-Point Shots in a Row
In basketball—but not in stockpicking—one success really does lead to another.
In 1985, Israeli psychologist Amos Tversky and two other researchers published a paper that rocked the world of sports. “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences,” which appeared in the journal Cognitive Psychology, said streaks and “hot hands” are illusions: Contrary to perception, hitting one shot doesn’t make a player any more likely to hit the next.
Players and fans who think they can spot a hot hand could be suffering from “memory bias,” where streaks are more memorable than on-and-off shooting even though not more likely, some researchers said. There was even a theory that the tendency to see patterns in what’s actually random behavior was a kind of apophenia, which according to Wikipedia was “coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.”