#596： The Mystery, Science, and Life-Changing Power of the Hot Hand
Episode Stats
Summary
Have you ever had a period in your athletic or professional career where you felt like you were on fire? Maybe you made a whole streak of consecutive shots in a game, or executed one good idea after another at work? In his new book, The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks, my guest explores why success sometimes seems to arrive in clusters like this.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast have you had a
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period in your athletic or professional career where you kind of felt like you were on fire
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maybe you made a whole streak of consecutive shots in a game or executed one good idea after
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another at work in his book the hot hand the mystery and science of streaks my guest today
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explores why success sometimes seems to arrive in clusters like this his name is ben cohen he's a
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sports writer for the wall street journal ben and i begin our conversation with an explanation of
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what it means to have a hot hand and how this phenomenon has often been studying in basketball
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but can also be seen in a wide range of areas including the film career of rob reiner we then
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discuss what may cause winning streaks whether or not they can be induced and what stephen curry does
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when he starts feeling hot in a game we also talk about what the video game nba jam can teach us about
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the psychology of the hot hand boom shakalaka we then dig into what the academic research has found
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on whether the hot hand truly exists or is really just a cognitive illusion and we enter conversation
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with what you can start doing today to take advantage of having a hot hand after the show's
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over check out our show notes at aom.is slash hot hand
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all right ben cohen welcome to the show thank you for having me so you were a sports writer for the
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wall street journal you got a new book out the hot hand the mystery and science of streaks so what got
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you going on this deep dive on whether the hot hand exists in sports well it's a really compelling
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subject first of all i wrote a few stories about the hot hand for the wall street journal a few years
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ago and honestly usually what happens after i write stories and think about stories and like spend time
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talking to people about those stories is that by the time they publish i'm just so sick of them i don't
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want to think about those stories anymore the opposite kind of happened with these stories that
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i wrote about the hot hand i wasn't really like exhausted by them i was kind of invigorated by them
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and i just felt like i was still getting started like i was only scratching the surface of what i could
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possibly learn about the hot hand so that doesn't happen often and the fact that it did happen made me
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think that there might be something bigger here so let's talk about what we mean by hot hands i think
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everyone knows sort of the layman's definition about hot hand so let's talk about that and then
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let's also talk about what how researchers scientists academics define hot hand sure so i don't think
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there's like a singular definition of the hot hand i think it means different things in different
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industries but i like to think of it like very simply as when success leads to more success that's
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kind of the simplest way to put it so in basketball for example and it's always been studied in basketball
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which is one of the things that really appealed to me about this idea in basketball it's when you make
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one shot and then another shot and then another shot and you feel more likely to make your next
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shot you can't miss you're in the zone you are on fire but what's really irresistible about this
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phenomenon is that it's not simply about basketball this is really about human behavior and i think that
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we are all familiar with this feeling of the hot hand those times when we're on a roll and nothing can
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stop us and what i have found is that if we take advantage of those times they can kind of elevate
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our careers and maybe even change our entire lives and where else do we see this the hot hand besides
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basketball everywhere i you know honestly i know that sounds that that sounds a little bit ambitious
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but what i have found is that like once you start looking for the hot hand you kind of bump into it
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anywhere you look and so that's movie making that's like you know in your own careers it's writing
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it's investing it's like it that this this power of streaks there's like a magic to it there's
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something of a mystery to it too but like this is not limited to basketball or just sports has
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wide-ranging impacts and it applies very very broadly yeah an example of streak showing up in
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movies can be seen in the films of rob reiner i mean this guy made hit after hit after hit even with
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movies that had previously been difficult to get made and that people didn't think would ever be a hit
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that's right the first three movies that rob reiner made were spinal tap stand by me and the
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sure thing and there was this incredible newspaper story after these three movies came out that sort
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of distilled the essence of rob reiner's directing career to its essence which basically this newspaper
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reporter said rob reiner's movies are hits not because everybody expected them to be hits but because
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nobody expected them to be hits they were these delightful contradictions and so what happens
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after he makes three movies that nobody wanted him to make but turned out to be either critically
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successful or commercially successful what happens is that people think that he has the hot hand and
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the perception of him has changed in hollywood and so he has this incredible exchange with a studio
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executive around this time where the studio executive says we want to be in business with you like we
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we will we will make any movie you want to make just name that movie and what rob reiner says is
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trust me you don't want to make the movie i want to make and she says no really just like name the
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movie tell us and he says no really you don't want to make this movie and finally she puts an end to
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this abbott and costella routine they have going and she says just name the movie what movie do you
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want to make and rob reiner says the movie i want to make is called the princess bride and the studio
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executive says anything but the princess bride and for for many years the princess bride had been
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like a riddle like haunted by a curse it was the great white whale of hollywood even though it was
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written by william goldman who said it was like the best thing he ever wrote and this is the guy who
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wrote butch cassidy and he wrote all the president's men even though like it was this incredibly rich
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material robert redford had tried to make it and star in it and he couldn't true foe jewison all of
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these brilliant directors before rob reiner had tried to make the princess bride and they all failed
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what allowed rob reiner to make the princess bride even when nobody else wanted him to make it and
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even when he came very close to not making it it was that hard was that he did have a hand right
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there were these resources available to him he had some capital he had this runway and he was able to
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use it on this movie that has become like this beloved cult classic i mean one of the most beloved
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films we have now the cool thing about this movie is that it actually elevated him to an even higher
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level because after the princess bride comes out he then rips off when harry met sally misery and a few
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good men which is like the second hot hand period but it's very clear that like only because he did have
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the hot hand was he able to leverage that to his advantage and like the world in some cases have never
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been the same because like you know i think the princess bride there are these classic lines that
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are just seared into our memory over time well and you've had there's researchers who study this
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phenomenon of success that comes up in clusters they have any they have any idea why it happens is it
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like talent is it circumstances is it just luck what's going on there i think it's actually a little
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bit of all three i like to think of the hot hand is when like it's this collision of talent and
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circumstance and a little bit of luck i think you put it very well what they what these researchers who
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have studied creativity and workplace success have found is that our best work happens to come in
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bunches like our creative hits they're clustered and this is in movie making but it's also in science
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and it's art and it's it's anywhere these researchers believe where they would have bothered to look for
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it so the people who wrote this paper a couple years ago they wanted to put these very objective
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numbers to the very subjective issue of taste like what makes a movie good and how do we know if
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that movie is good and so for movies they looked at imdb ratings for art they looked at auction prices
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and for science they looked at google scholar citations these are not perfect metrics but they're about
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the best that we have and what they found is that like if they knew what your best work is they would
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probably be able to find your second and third best work because it's right around that best work
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we have these hot hand periods in our careers and the really interesting thing about that is that
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they tend to define our careers they're like what people remember about what we do at work so like
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when we think about rob reiner we think about that hot hand period we think about the princess bride
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going into misery and a few good men and when harry met sally and like the movies that made that
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possible so the the reason they are so interested in this is because like they want to know like
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how do we work and how do we maximize our productivity and clearly the hot hand plays some role in that
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and have they found any ways to induce the hot hand or is it just a matter of just it just happens
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i think it just happens which is which is sort of the elusive and the frustrating and like this like
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devilishly entertaining thing about it i actually asked i figured i was like you know i who can i ask
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about this who has felt hot before that i could ask like if they if they have any way to predict
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what's coming and so i thought that the greatest shooter in the history of basketball week would be a
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good person so i asked steph curry about this and i said like do you know when you are about to get hot
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because we all like watching steph curry get hot is like i think it's the most thrilling thing in
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sports and what he said which i think is really interesting is that he doesn't know when he's
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going to get hot he doesn't know where he's going to get hot or why or how he's going to get hot
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but once he does get hot he has to embrace it and i think that's a cool way of thinking about it
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like once you do get hot once you realize you are in that moment the only thing you could do is embrace
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it and as you say too curry is a good example of how a hot hand occurs from a meeting of
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of talent and circumstance and the special energy that emerges out of that to me like sometimes
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circumstance bends your way and so like if you're steph curry and you come along when the nba has
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never put such a premium on three pointers and people who can shoot from outside like that circumstance
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that he wouldn't have had in the 1970s and 1980s right like he came along at the perfect time
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and he had this one game that elevated his career and nothing was ever the same like not his life
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not the fate of the golden state warriors not the future of the entire nba but there are also people
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who live at the wrong time and aren't able to capitalize on that streak now something else
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changes clearly which is that like we have this burst of confidence something changes within us and
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we're able to feel that momentum and and our own behavior changes sometimes that's good and
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sometimes that's bad but like you know you think about it in terms of basketball we have these heat
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check moments where we feel like we have the freedom to do things that we wouldn't ordinarily
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do and so in basketball that means like pulling up from 30 feet and taking a shot with a hand in our
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face for rob reiner it meant making the princess bride but like clearly something changes and and so
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sometimes it's like talent taking advantage sometimes it's circumstance sometimes it's just like pure dumb
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luck like sometimes like you just need things to to happen that you wouldn't expect to happen and
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probably have never happened at any other time but if they do happen as to as steph curry says like
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you have to embrace it so some other things you looked at about the psychology of what makes streaks
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so appealing is you went to i think a classic video game of a lot of people's childhoods i know it
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was mine nba jam yeah so i remember i saw the title of this book the hot hand he's like he better talk
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about nba jam you know talk about it right away warming up he's on fire it's like what what can
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that game teach us about the psychology of streaks well clearly that they're powerful so the thing
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about that game is that it was made by this brilliant video game designer named mark tramell
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and when mark tramell was growing up he loved three things he loved basketball and he loved video games
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and what he really loved was fire he was actually a bit of a pyromaniac and he would combine those
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three childhood loves into the biggest hit of his career and so when i grew up playing nba jam when
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steph curry grew up playing nba jam when probably you grew up playing nba jam the game was everywhere
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it was ubiquitous right what i did not realize was that like that wasn't just me or you or steph curry
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it was everybody like everybody played nba jam it was one of the most lucrative successful games
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ever made it made a billion dollars and quarters not a million like a billion with a b in less than
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one year it was this monster hit and so when i started thinking about why when i asked mark tramell
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why like what made nba jam so so powerful like why did we always want to play this game
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clearly like there are any number of theories it's it was a fun game to play basketball was fun even
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though it had nothing to do with basketball it was a basketball game that like was modeled on a sci-fi
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game based on like a post-apocalyptic society it was not like any other basketball game or sports game
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but what i think is that like it was it was magical to hear those three words he's heating up and then
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those next three words he's on fire there was something alluring about that superpower of the hot
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hand and you always wanted to get to that mode where you do three things and then a fourth thing
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happens what i think is that mark tramell kind of single-handedly brainwashed a generation of
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impressionable young minds into believing in this concept of the hot hand because until i read all
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this literature about the hot hand it never even occurred to me that there might not be a thing
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called the hot hand because honestly like i played nba jam of course there's a thing called the hot hand
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and yeah that's the thing i mean what i think the hot hand in nba jam teaches you being on fire is that
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it's really addictive like you'll just keep going so you can get back in it because like once you're
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there like every shot you make for like the next minute or two it's going to go in i think addictive
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is like a perfect way to do it and you and not only addictive means like you want to keep doing it
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right like you want to keep feeding quarters into that machine to keep playing nba jam to try to get to
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that mode and like this was purposeful mark tramell in every game he has made since then over the last
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like 25 30 years he has tried to bake some sort of hot hand mode into that game because he knows
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it's addicting and he knows that it makes people want to keep playing his games so i think people
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have maybe experienced the hot hand themselves like i'm not a basketball player but i've had that
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moment where i've been played some like pickup ball where every ball i put up seems to go in
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steph curry has has experienced it we've probably seen steph curry when we everyone's seen steph curry do
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that but then you talk about in the 80s there's a group of academics saying yeah hot hand it's
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actually illusions let's talk about that research yeah this was it was it was this classic paper that
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was written by tom gilovich bob valone and the great amos tversky who is just one of the brightest minds of
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his generation and what they did was they looked for the hot hand in basketball because they had a sense
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that it was simply going to be a case of seeing patterns in randomness where they don't exist and
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their theory was that what we call the hot hand is actually just a way of rationalizing what we think
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of as patterns and so what they were able to do was secure the best data that was available at the time
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and it came from this official scorekeeper of the philadelphia 76ers a guy named harvey pollack who
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was way ahead of his time he was nicknamed super stat because he was like one of the only people in
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sports paying attention to statistics back then and they looked at the chronology of shots the order
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in which they were taken and what they were trying to find was like are you more likely to make your
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next shot after making two or three shots in a row now they asked basketball players this they asked
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professional players they asked players at their schools almost all of them to a man said of course
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there's such a thing as the hot hand and it's important to feed the hot hand when someone has
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made a couple shots in a row you want to get them the ball and this is an example of like changing
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behavior it's exactly what psychologists and economists study however once they looked at the
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data this play-by-play and the order of shots in which they were taken they found there's there was
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really no evidence to support that shift in behavior you were actually not any more likely to make your
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next shot when you were on fire it was sort of a cognitive illusion and that made for this like
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really delicious contrarian counterintuitive paper that they published and has since become like part
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of the canon of behavioral economics it's one of the most famous papers in the history of academic
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psychology and you know the the fascinating thing about it is that like even after it was published
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people just wouldn't believe it they they took it to a reporter told the former boston celtics coach
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red hourback about this paper once and he just sort of sneered and discussed and said like so these guys
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make a paper like i couldn't care less like anyone who has been in basketball and seen the hot hand
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and felt the hot hand just like would could not wrap their minds around the fact that it actually
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might not be real and that paper held up for like 35 years and that's changed a bit in recent years now
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even though there is there's been some evidence to the contrary that has come along recently like i i have
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to say i still find that paper so admirable because just the contrarian nature of it this the way that
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they were able to look at something and see something that nobody else had seen is just so
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cool to me and i think that they're probably right about what they found like we still do see patterns
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and randomness for one thing but also the hot hand is not like this exaggerated fireball of our
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imagination from playing nba jam like that is not real life and so they were clearly onto something
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whether or not there's no such thing as the hot hand i think is like an open question now and i think
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that we have reason to think that like there is such a thing as a hot hand when circumstance allows
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for it we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show
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what so yeah i think the paper does it raises the point that humans beings have the tendency to find
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patterns where patterns don't exist so example of this during world war ii when britain was getting
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bombed like they thought there was a pattern to the german bombing when in fact it was just random
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and then you also highlight how music is shuffled that like our tendency to find patterns can actually
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mess up the way or it skews the way we think of like when we hit apple shuffle or spotify shuffle like
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we we think there's a pattern going on when there's actually not a pattern that's right we make
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playlists and we ask apple and spotify to shuffle them and yet sometimes we think that those shuffle
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buttons are broken because we think that this random music is not actually random this was a
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problem actually that both spotify and apple had to solve not too long ago because we would hear the
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same song twice in a row on a playlist or we hear the same artist twice in a row on a playlist when there
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are 10 15 20 artists and we were convinced that something was wrong not only something was wrong with
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like the the algorithm but like that there was almost something corrupt happening like like the record
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labels were paying spotify to play certain artists more than others that's not what was happening
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it's just that we see patterns and we remember when we hear two songs by like beyonce in a row even if
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there are you know lots of other artists on that playlist and so what spotify and apple had to do was
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actually tweak their code and change their algorithms and it was a bit absurd but what they did was they took
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playlists and if there are 10 artists on that playlist they would evenly disperse those artists
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over the course of the playlist to guarantee that you wouldn't hear the same song or the same artist
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twice in a row and like no less than steve jobs got on stage at an apple keynote about 15 years ago
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and he explained like their thinking behind all this and it was so absurd that he like he couldn't even
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help but laugh at the situation because when you think about it what they actually did was they made it
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less random to feel more random like that's nuts and it's because we have a really hard time
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wrapping our minds around randomness and so spotify and apple didn't stick to their guns and say like
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well this is purely random and you have to get used to it they actually just gave their users what we
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want and what we want is to not think about pure randomness so believing in the hot hand let's just say
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let's say the we're not even gonna say the hot hand exists it may or may not but believing the hot hand
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and say basketball the stakes aren't that high it's a game but what would happen if someone believed
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the hot hand and say like if they were a farmer what would be the consequences of that yeah it's
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the same thing as like investing in the market and if if if you are a farmer i actually took a trip to
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a farm on the border of minnesota and north dakota not too long ago to meet with a fifth generation
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sugar beet farmer named nick hagan and i wanted to know like do you believe in the hot hand and more
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more important do you behave as if you believe in the hot hand and what nick said is like
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yeah i believe in the hot hand like i've played sports i watch basketball i've seen the hot hand
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for myself but i can't believe in the hot hand when i am farming because if you are a farmer and you look
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at what happened last year or the year before and you invest your resources accordingly you're
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essentially betting the farm and if you're wrong you go broke because there's a difference in farming
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than there is in basketball and in farming like the way that nick says is that farming is defense
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which is a really interesting way to think about it like when steph curry is shooting he's playing
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offense he's in control he has agency over his own situation nick doesn't like nick's success and his
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business are based on things that are like pretty much random like the weather the weather can determine
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whether or not you have a good year or a bad year and so when i think of the hot hand i have to
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remind myself that what the crucial distinction here is is control when we have control we feel
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that we can have the hot hand when we recognize that we don't have control we kind of know we're at
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the mercy of chance and believing in the hot hand can be dangerous it can be costly it can backfire
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and it can burn us a little bit so there are plenty of industries farming is a good one investing
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your money is actually another really good one where you sort of have to recognize
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when you can and when you can't have the hot hand and and what your environment allows and whether
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you are in an industry that encourages skilled performance or random performance so another
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people would call a fallacy these psychologists who say the hot hand doesn't exist another fallacy
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it's sort of the opposite of the hot hand is the gambler's fallacy what does that look like and
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how does the gambler's fallacy show up in daily life you know it's funny because i like to think of
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the gambler's fallacy through basketball as well so in basketball you make three shots in a row everybody
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in the arena thinks you're making a fourth shot that's the hot hand in gambling it's when you walk
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into a casino you walk over to a roulette wheel and you see the wheel land on red three times in a row
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what research has shown is that most people actually bet on black the fourth time now these are really
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interesting scenarios because they're essentially the same three things happen what do we do for the
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fourth and when we think we're in control we have the hot hand when we recognize that we're not
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we bet accordingly one is the hot hand one is the gambler's fallacy and the gambler's fallacy has
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huge impacts on our decision making as much as the hot hand i mean it's it's a similar idea it's
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whether or not we are betting on the streak to continue or the streak to end and so i mean where does
00:23:23.960
that i mean i'm trying to think of like an example besides gambling where people would make they say
00:23:28.520
something happens and they do the opposite because they saw a streak so one good example when you
00:23:33.060
think about people who make decisions people in authority positions like there there was one paper
00:23:38.520
that looked at the gambler's fallacy in a few of those industries one was loan officers one was
00:23:43.360
baseball umpires baseball umpires like if you if you call two close strikes in a row you are much less
00:23:49.440
likely to call a close pitch a third strike the next time even if it actually is a strike like what
00:23:55.380
it's it's all because like you're you're you're trying to even out the probability in your own
00:24:00.220
mind the one i write about in the book is asylum judges this is kind of crushing and it's a little
00:24:05.540
bit depressing but if you are a refugee in search of asylum your application is not simply judged on
00:24:12.920
your merits they are based on like lots of other things including when your case is heard so asylum
00:24:19.620
judges are much less likely to grant asylum if they have just granted asylum two or three times in a row
00:24:25.360
now a baseball umpire doing that might be trivial but an asylum judge essentially has someone else's
00:24:31.300
life in their hands and because they are trying to even out the streak because they have all of this
00:24:38.380
power and and they they don't want to encourage a hot hand they're trying to stop it and they're
00:24:43.180
trying to get to a point in their mind where they they're sort of they sort of embody this regression
00:24:47.700
to the mean like refugees regardless of the merits of their case suffer from that which which i find
00:24:53.920
really demoralizing and it sort of shows the human consequence of this idea of the hot hand like this
00:25:00.160
is not just about basketball or even behavior like there are huge effects that people can suffer from
00:25:06.280
this beyond like making one shot in basketball all right so that paper written in 86 sort of became an
00:25:11.980
article of faith that the hot hand didn't exist at least amongst academics they said it didn't exist
00:25:16.180
it's just everything's random it just appears like there's a streak going on but then these two
00:25:20.840
harvard students had a hunch that the previous studies that this hot hand paper was based off
00:25:26.260
were flawed and that the hot hand could actually exist so tell us about these guys and what led them
00:25:31.920
to believe that the original hot hand paper was flawed yeah not just not like harvard students not
00:25:37.520
like you know grad students or phd students or professors i mean undergrads like kids in their
00:25:42.380
college dorm they they actually looked at the hot hand as part of an independent study these econ
00:25:47.380
majors a couple years ago and and what they wanted to know was like does today's data bear out that
00:25:53.440
result from 1985 like the data we have now it was just unavailable to the researchers in the 80s in their
00:26:00.500
nerdiest wonkiest wildest dreams and what these undergrads were able to do was they were able to um to
00:26:07.520
to control for for what happens when somebody gets hot now think about when someone gets hot like
00:26:12.680
it warps the behavior of everybody around them in basketball if you're the shooter you want to
00:26:18.940
shoot more you are taking crazier shots longer shots riskier shots your teammates are passing you
00:26:24.060
the ball your coaches are calling plays for you the defense is adjusting as well they're sending
00:26:28.440
double teams at you they are making it their mission to make sure that you do not shoot because
00:26:32.780
you are hot right now for a very long time until these kids came along we weren't able to control for
00:26:39.220
those shifts right like there was no way to know if someone was taking a layup or a three-pointer or
00:26:45.460
a long three-pointer or a trickier three-pointer it was just a shot was a shot and that was it but they
00:26:52.400
were able to get to negotiate access to this trove of data that came from these high-resolution
00:26:57.260
tracking cameras in every nba arena starting about 10 years ago and because they were able to look at
00:27:03.100
the distance of the defender and the distance of the shot they were actually able to compute
00:27:08.420
the probability of that shot going in and once they controlled for that probability they were able
00:27:14.580
to show that when you do get hot you're actually slightly more likely to make your next shot because
00:27:21.780
if you control for the difficulty of a shot it had always been mass the hot hand like it had been
00:27:26.380
disguised because we take chances we take riskier shots and longer shots and crazier shots and when those
00:27:34.200
shots go in like they are actually a sign and they had they had been all along we just had no way of
00:27:40.960
knowing it that the hot hand actually might be a real thing and and and this example was curious to
00:27:46.600
me and and was really appealing because it showed that like this data that we have now this better
00:27:51.960
data not just bigger data but better data and more granular data it can tell us things that we'd
00:27:57.340
always suspected but like could never prove for sure because we didn't have the data the data wasn't good
00:28:02.940
enough yet it hadn't caught up to our own minds and that's kind of what happened with the hot hand
00:28:08.860
like the data that was used in that 1985 paper was the best data available at the time but times have
00:28:15.860
changed and so has the data and the data now tells us something that we all thought to be true we just
00:28:21.260
couldn't say for sure because the data had never been good enough and about the same time these two
00:28:26.480
harvard undergrads were doing this this study this research there are also two economists who also
00:28:31.940
started arguing that the hot hand fallacy studies that travisky did miss something really important
00:28:36.980
when they made their conclusion the hot hand didn't exist so what did travisky miss that these guys saw
00:28:41.860
you know honestly it i i have learned that trying to explain this bias that they found yeah i had to read
00:28:49.360
it like five times so it's like to get it i know this sounds like a cop-out but like just read the
00:28:55.320
book just like just look at this table because you kind of have to wrap your mind around it in a very
00:29:00.620
strange way and and and actually that's important because like this was a very very subtle statistical
00:29:06.800
bias that some of the world's brightest statisticians had missed for 35 years like nobody had seen this and
00:29:14.080
so for me to talk about it for me to describe exactly what they found is tricky but essentially
00:29:19.340
what they found was that for 35 years the fact that you shot the same when you were hot was always
00:29:26.800
taken as bulletproof evidence against the hot hand like you were not more likely you were the same
00:29:32.360
amount but what these two young american economists in europe found was this bias that shows that if you
00:29:38.900
are a 50 percent shooter and you shoot 50 percent when you feel hot that actually is evidence for
00:29:44.500
the hot hand and we have been looking at this very old problem in the wrong way for like almost four
00:29:51.460
decades and the math is right it's been rubber stamped it's been published by like the top economic
00:29:56.780
journal all of these brilliant mathematicians and statisticians who have read the paper say it's right
00:30:02.060
it's super trippy it's really mind-boggling but it it lent this new chapter to this saga of the
00:30:08.260
hot hand that it actually kind of flipped it on its head in a little bit like it showed that we're
00:30:12.940
still thinking about this old problem and new ways of thinking about that problem can lead us to new
00:30:18.780
conclusions about it so i i actually this is sort of like the the the new entry into this field of
00:30:25.260
hot hand studies this growing scientific literature and i think what it did was ensure that this debate is
00:30:31.300
not dying anytime soon like there are going to be more papers about this because like it it's a topic
00:30:37.660
it's a idea it's a phenomenon that kind of drives us a little bit crazy and we just want to keep
00:30:42.340
thinking about it well in amos travisky's partner uh daniel kahneman you know they wrote thinking fast
00:30:47.500
and slow like he was at a presentation where these guys are making their argument that they made a
00:30:52.080
statistical error and daniel kahneman was like yeah you guys are right yeah exactly i mean you know i i was
00:30:56.740
there that day and kahneman says like you know it's unfortunate they made that error but i think their point
00:31:00.820
still stands that we see patterns where they don't exist in randomness and we invent causes to
00:31:06.340
explain them and i think that's right and i think the cool thing about the hot hand is that we have
00:31:09.900
been talking about this idea for like 35 40 years and there are very smart people on both sides of this
00:31:16.360
debate and like i think part of the fun of it is just toying around with this idea for yourself and
00:31:21.640
seeing where you land thinking about like where the hot hand is possible where it's not possible what
00:31:27.840
circumstance allow for it and what circumstances actively punish belief in the hot hand like it's it's
00:31:34.760
it's that's sort of the beauty of this world of ideas is that we can each come to our own
00:31:39.140
conclusions we can do the work we can read the papers and we can figure out what we think for
00:31:43.160
ourselves it'd be interesting to see the future of hot hand research if they're going to start doing
00:31:47.080
things like measuring you know the physiology of you know players who experience the hot hand no i think
00:31:51.200
so too i think i would love to see like people strap electrodes to our brains and try to figure out
00:31:56.240
exactly what is happening neurologically inside of us when we do feel hot i think we're we're able to do
00:32:02.320
that sort of research now and it would be kind of fascinating to see it done on this like a in a
00:32:07.180
huge population sample and i think people would be interested in it because people have been
00:32:11.600
interested in this subject for 35 years at this point i mean so what do you think the the like
00:32:16.220
practical takeaways like someone's listening to this podcast right now they're like okay this is
00:32:19.680
interesting hot hand maybe exists like how how can they apply this to their lives well i think it's
00:32:24.360
important to think about like when we can take those own heat checks in our lives right like
00:32:29.000
recognizing when we do have the hot hand and taking advantage of them because they can change
00:32:33.900
a lot like i have felt it in my own career there have been a few times not many but a few when like
00:32:39.860
writing and reporting stories at the wall street journal when i do feel hot and something has
00:32:44.260
changed and i try to remind myself in those moments like this is the time to really hunker down and do
00:32:48.920
everything you can because the other thing we know about the hot hand is that it does not last
00:32:53.140
forever it goes away and that's like the most frustrating thing about it because
00:32:57.260
we know that like it's not forever and so we have to take advantage of it while we can now and there
00:33:02.860
are a bunch of other like behavioral quirks and changes that we can make and so like just thinking
00:33:08.360
about where there is a hot hand or or where you might be prone to seeing patterns or or where like
00:33:14.520
there might be examples of the gambler's fallacy and like how to adjust for them in in the book i tell
00:33:20.100
the story of one of these yale economists who has studied the gambler's fallacy and he realized that
00:33:26.180
he was subject to that very same bias that he wrote about and so now when he grades papers and assigns
00:33:32.920
his teaching assistants um to to look at exams what he does is that he he recognizes that sometimes if
00:33:40.200
you read one paper that comes after like two a plus papers that paper is not going to read all that
00:33:46.160
well even though it might be perfectly fine it might be an a it might be an a minus but when it comes
00:33:50.620
after those two a pluses it might read like a b or a b minus and so what he does is he takes all of his
00:33:56.040
papers and he splits them in two and he shuffles them and he lets his teaching assistants grade them
00:34:02.200
twice in different orders to try to reduce that bias as much as possible he will then average those two
00:34:09.420
scores and weight them accordingly and like that's not perfect but it's a whole lot better than what his
00:34:15.500
system was then so i think there are all types of ways of of factoring these biases into our own
00:34:20.720
minds and trying to adjust for them and and and seeing where they lead us and if you're not
00:34:25.640
experiencing the hot hand you just got to keep pumping the quarters in to the machine until you
00:34:29.260
start warming up again that's it's that's actually the secret of the book just keep playing nba jam
00:34:33.800
regardless of what you do and i think things will work out right well ben this has been a great
00:34:37.860
conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your work well they can find the book
00:34:41.340
anywhere books are sold and they can read me in the wall street journal and they can find my best
00:34:45.360
stories and more about the book at bzcohen.com and i am bzcohen on every social media platform that
00:34:53.400
we're all trying to avoid these days well ben cohen thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:34:57.140
thanks so much my guest today was ben cohen he is the author of the book the hot hand the mystery
00:35:02.440
and science of streaks it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find out more
00:35:06.340
information about his work at his website bzcohen.com also check out our show notes at
00:35:10.720
aom.is slash hot hand where you can find links to resources and we can delve deeper into this topic
00:35:15.080
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at
00:35:25.840
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00:35:29.620
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00:35:59.240
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