With March Madness cancelled and the NBA playoffs on hold for now, I thought you might be interested in some science.
I’m not kidding.
Sports science, that is.
If you play sports, you may have been lucky enough to feel the hot hand.
It’s a mental and physical phenomena when everything you do clicks.
You shoot and the ball clears the basket, nothing but net. In golf, your long putt unbelievably sinks.
Name a sport and at times you have the hot hand or are in “the zone.” Everything is going right as it has been for many local high school teams, especially Dutch Fork in football and Gray Collegiate and the Lady Gamecocks in basketball.
What it is
To have the hot hand is to achieve an elevated state in which you feel superhuman.
Sportswriter Ben Cohan believes there is not a more pleasurable sensation – with your clothes on.
 The ethereal feeling of having the hot hand exists in nearly every industry and touches nearly everybody.
But one curious thing about the hot hand: It isn’t supposed to exist.
The hot hand has been studied by scholars, brilliant minds and Nobel Prize winners for nearly 40 years.
An intellectual battle began in 1985 with a scientific paper called “The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences” which became part of behavioral economics.
This revealed a dangerous bias – that we see patterns where they don’t exist.
That means no hot hand.
 A seductive idea
Researchers Tom Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky studied how this applies to basketball.
You’ve sunk a few shots in a row and believe you’re more likely to sink your next shot because you’ve made those previous shots.
Their research wasn’t limited to basketball. It just happened to be an excuse to explore everything.
They looked at– how we manage money, how our favorite movies get made, how we listen to music, how we hire for jobs and how we make decisions, all having to do with the hot hand.
What the psychologists behind the paper didn’t realize was that they had stumbled upon a seductive idea that would follow them for the rest of their lives. 
Biased research
The most significant breakthrough came from young American economists who looked at the hot hand and saw a statistical bias that others had missed.
In correcting the math, they calculated a hot hand existed and always had.
 This made sense to those who believed early research misread randomness.
What they are not saying is the role confidence plays in having the hot hand. Without confidence you can make it, you wouldn’t try tough shots anyway.
Have you experienced a winning streak? Do you believe the hot hand exists?
I want to hear from you.
Please write me at ChronicleSports@yahoo.com .