The hot hand belief as an inference of local temporal instability

Abstract

The correspondence article (Shea, 2013, "In support of a hot hand…") examines MLB's Home Run Derby and the NBA's 3-point Shootout data, and reveals nonstationarity as empirical evidence supporting the hot hand belief. This result, together with recent understanding on human probabilistic reasoning with sparse data, suggests that the hot hand belief may have been driven by local and temporal instability in the task environment. We argue that computational models of the hot hand belief should take into consideration not only top-down cognitive biases but also the statistical structures of the task environment, where global structures evolve from intrinsically local properties centered on temporal instability.

Keywords: hot hand; nonstationarity; temporal instability; waiting time.