[6] The study proposed two biases that are created by the kind of thought pattern applied to the coin toss: it could lead an individual to believe that the probability of heads or tails increases after a long sequence of either has occurred (known as the gambler's fallacy); or it could cause an individual to reject randomness due to a belief that a streak of either outcome is not representative of a random sample.
[6] In the later studies involving the controlled shooting experiment the results were the same; evidently, the researchers concluded that the sense of being "hot" does not predict hits or misses.
[7] To test this idea researchers conducted a cross-sectional study where they sampled 455 participants ranging in age from 22 to 90 years old.
These participants were given a questionnaire preceded by a prompt that said in college and professional basketball games no players make 100% of their attempted shots.
The results showed that participants over 70 years of age were twice as likely to believe the fallacy than adults 40–49,[7] confirming that the older individuals relied more on heuristic-based processes.
[8] In 2018 Miller and Sanjurjo published a new analysis of the original research of Gilovich, Tversky, and Vallone (GTV) and in contrast concluded that there is "significant evidence of streak shooting".
[9] Miller and Sanjurjo concluded that there is indeed a statistical basis for the hot hand phenomenon in the hit pattern of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Miller and Sanjurjo show analytically for a series of one hit (and empirically for bigger streaks) that this introduces a bias towards more misses, given that the number following samples is small enough (e.g. less than 100 for a fair coin).
They also searched for sequential dependencies within each shooter per set of 25 continuous shots, and employed a variety of novel techniques for isolating hot performance.
By performing power analysis on the 1985 data, the researchers concluded that even if the Philadelphia 76ers did shoot in streaks, it is highly unlikely that Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky would have discovered that fact.
[12] A paper from October 2011 by Yaari and Eisenmann, a large dataset of more than 300,000 NBA free throws were found to show "strong evidence" for the "hot hand" phenomenon at the individual level.
[13] In November 2013, researchers at Stanford University used data from Major League Baseball and found that there was "strong evidence" that the hot hand existed in ten different statistical categories.
[2] In 2014, a paper from three Harvard graduates presented at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which used advanced statistics that for the first time could control for variables in basketball games such as the player's shot location and a defender's position, showed a "small yet significant hot-hand effect.
[3] A 2021 study, using data from NBA Three-Point Contests over the period 1986–2020, found "considerable evidence of hot hand shooting in and across individuals".
A study conducted by Joseph Johnson et al. examined the characteristics of an individual's buying and selling behavior as it pertained to the hot hand and gambler's heuristic.
Both of these occur when a consumer misunderstands random events in the market and is influenced by a belief that a small sample is able to represent the underlying process.
[16] To examine the effect of the hot hand and gambler's heuristic on the buying and selling behaviors of consumers, three hypotheses were made.
[17] Gambler's fallacy occurs mostly in cases in which people feel that an event is random, such as rolling a pair of dice on a craps table or spinning the roulette wheel.
In contrast, they attempted to initiate the hot-hand fallacy by centering the participant's focus on the person tossing the coin as a reason for the streak of either heads or tails.
The researchers found the results of this study to match their initial hypothesis that the gambler's fallacy could in fact be countered by the use of the hot hand and people's attention to the person who was actively flipping the coin.
[17] This study shed light on the idea that the gambler's and hot hand fallacies at times fight for dominance when people try to make predictions about the same event.