In describing an outstanding performance by a basketball player, reporters and spectators commonly use expressions such as “Larry Bird has the hot hand” or “Andrew Toney is a streak shooter.” These phrases express a belief that the performance of a player during a particular period is significantly better than expected on the basis of the player's overall record. The belief in “the hot hand” and in “streak shooting” is shared by basketball players, coaches, and fans, and it appears to affect the selection of plays and the choice of players. In this chapter, we investigate the origin and the validity of these beliefs.

People's intuitive conceptions of randomness depart systematically from the laws of chance. It appears that people expect the essential characteristics of a chance process to be represented not only globally in the entire sequence, but also locally, in each of its parts. For instance, people expect even short sequences of heads and tails to reflect the fairness of a coin and contain roughly 50% heads and 50% tails. This conception of chance has been described as a “belief in the law of small numbers” according to which the law of large numbers applies to small samples as well (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971). A locally representative sequence, however, deviates systematically from chance expectation: It contains too many alternations and not enough long runs.