Hot-hand fallacy
Reading a meaningful, self-sustaining streak into what is really just chance.
What it means
The hot-hand fallacy is the belief that a person enjoying a run of successes has a genuinely elevated probability of continuing — that they are 'hot' — when the sequence is statistically consistent with chance variation around a fixed success rate. It is the mirror image of the gambler's fallacy: here a streak is expected to persist rather than reverse, and both arise because human intuition expects random sequences to alternate more than they really do, so natural clusters of hits get over-interpreted as momentum. The original finding that basketball shooting showed no hot hand became a textbook case, but the debate is unusually live: later work by Miller and Sanjurjo identified a subtle selection bias in the original analysis, suggesting a small genuine hot-hand effect may exist after all, so the 'fallacy' is now partly contested. The deeper lesson survives regardless — people vastly overestimate how much streaks signal a real change in underlying ability. It matters wherever performance is noisy: investors chase 'hot' fund managers, employers over-reward recent winning streaks, and fans and coaches feed the ball to whoever is 'on fire,' often on far weaker evidence than they believe.
Examples
Fans and players are convinced a shooter who has just hit several in a row is far more likely to score again, and feed him the ball — though the boost over his usual rate is small at best.
Savers pour money into the fund that has beaten the market three years running, treating a short run of wins as proof of skill rather than ordinary noise.
A salesperson who closes four deals in a week is handed the biggest account, though nothing about her method changed and her rate across the year is unremarkable.
First described in Gilovich, Vallone & Tversky (1985).