However, the hot hand phenomenon is fairly controversial.

I will illustrate this with the hot hand phenomenon in basketball, which Gilovich, Vallone & Tversky (1985) established as a false belief by showing that basketball shots are not dependent.

The "hot-hand fallacy" (also known as the "hot hand phenomenon" or "hot hand") is the fallacious belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.

The pair collaborated with Robert Vallone, a cognitive psychologist, and all three became pioneers of the hot hand fallacy theory.

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.

The clustering illusion is central to the "hot hand fallacy", the first study of which was reported by Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky.

In his 1991 book How We Know What Isn't So, Thomas Gilovich details his empirical investigation of the hot hand fallacy.

However a 2015 examination of the original papers by Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo found flaws in the methodology and showed that, in fact, the hot hand fallacy may not exist.

Hot hand fallacy - Is the notion that a streak of positive successes are likely to continue, but statistics show that the probability of a streak continuing actually goes down as the length increases.

The study looked at the inability of respondents to properly understand randomness and random events; much like innumeracy can impair a person's judgement of statistical information, the hot hand fallacy can lead people to form incorrect assumptions regarding random events.