A hot hand

Just because you’ve been winning doesn’t mean to say that you’ll keep on winning… (Attribution: DanielASmith)

‘A hot hand’ is a phrase used to describe a lucky spell or winning streak. If someone has a ‘hot hand’ it often refers to them believing they are in luck whilst playing cards or gambling. This can lead to what some researchers refer to as the hot hand phenomenon. This phenomenon or fallacy is the belief that by experiencing success they have a greater chance of further success in games of chance. Looking at this through the laws of probability, for games such as roulette, the next outcome is independent of what happened before. This means that because you have won three times in a row, you are not more likely to win again then someone who had not won before. This may seem obvious though the presence of the ‘hot hand’ fallacy does exist!

This hot hand fallacy has been explained using the representativeness heuristic. Heuristics are short cuts we use compared to complex algorithmic processing of problems and these heuristics also tend to rely on existing cognitive abilities. The representativeness heuristic is one such example and is that we judge probability by similarity as opposed to using the rules of probability. In other words, that we would judge which group somebody is part of based on how similar they are to the rest of the group, not based on the probability of how many people are in each group. So if given a stereotyped description of a librarian, we would say they are more likely to be a librarian than a different profession like a teacher which is more common.

Ayton and Fischer (2004) proposed that our general (and incorrect) concept of randomness is the basis for the representativeness account for the hot hand fallacy. This means that you would reject the random sequences seen as being unrepresentative of your concept of statistical randomness. If you observe a long run of success then you believe that the outcomes are not random and therefore invoke the hot hand fallacy that this run of success will continue. They found that participants believed that after a run of successes, another success was more likely and that after a run of losses, another loss was more likely.

So it appears that we do not understand that sequences in games of chance are random and if we see a run of a particular outcome we assume that this will continue. This means that not only do we believe in ‘hot hands’ but also in ‘cold hands’ which may explain why some people believe that they are unlucky in general. In conclusion, despite our belief in ‘hot hands’ no such thing exists. What is present is a run of successes in a random sequence of outcomes that we incorrectly perceive as being representative of a run of wins. So remember, just because you have been lucky previously has no bearing whatsoever on future outcomes in games of chance.