Summary: The clustering illusion refers to the tendency to erroneously perceive small samples from random distributions as having significant “streaks” or “clusters”, caused by a human tendency to underpredict the amount of variability likely to appear in a small sample of random or semi-random data due to chance.

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The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences

We investigate the origin and the validity of common beliefs regarding “the hot hand” and “streak shooting” in the game of basketball. Basketball players and fans alike tend to believe that a player’s chance of hitting a shot are greater following a hit than following a miss on the previous shot. However, detailed analyses of the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers provided no evidence for a positive correlation between the outcomes of successive shots. The same conclusions emerged from free-throw records of the Boston Celtics, and from a controlled shooting experiment with the men and women of Cornell’s varsity teams. The outcomes of previous shots influenced Cornell players’ predictions but not their performance. The belief in the hot hand and the “detection” of streaks in random sequences is attributed to a general misconception of chance according to which even short random sequences are thought to be highly representative of their generating process.

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