MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIE TY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC
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Scientists might not know
hot hand when they see it
Numbers never tell the whole story, even
about sports. Numbers seldom tell the
whole story about science, either.
Consider the controversy regarding
the hot-hand phenomenon in basketball. As Bruce Bower reports on Page
26 of this issue, humans may have been
programmed by evolution to perceive
clumps (or streaks) that are actually just statistical fluctuations. So some scientists believe that basketball players never
really have a hot hand — any long run of successful shots is just
one of those streaks that occasionally happen by chance.
Some scientific studies of the hot-hand effect have been
unable to show that it is anything more than randomness
in disguise. Fans and players, on the other hand, continue
to insist that it exists. Perhaps basketball experts have been
fooled by their evolution-based predispositions. Or maybe the
scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.
In hot-hand studies, scientists examine propositions such
as “making one shot increases the likelihood of making the
next” as a definition of a hot hand. Or data are examined for
streaks of consecutive made shots, or for sets of shots where
a high percentage are made. A 1985 analysis along those lines
found no reason to suspect anything other than chance variations in shooting performance. Hence the widespread belief
that the existence of hot hands has been disproved by science.
That’s all very nice, but upon further review this conclusion
is not confirmed. A subsequent study embedded nonrandom
streaks of exceptional shooting in a computer simulation
of basketball data. Methods used by the earlier study failed
to find most of the embedded streaks. In other words, the
method for concluding that hot hands did not exist was not
in fact capable of finding hot hands if they did exist.
But apart from that disconfirmation, the whole issue was
misposed in the first place. No player would define “hot hand”
merely as meaning that making a shot raised the probability
of also making the next one. A hot hand reflects a complex,
subjective psychological and physiological state of mind and
body. Scientists define “hot hand” simply as an excess over
chance because that’s what they can measure. And sometimes
science’s methods of measurement don’t capture all there is to
reality. So it’s a good idea to keep in mind when any scientific
study reports failure to find something, it could be because
that something isn’t there — or it could be because the study
wasn’t capable of finding it. — Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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