Evolution & Human Behavior
Volume 30, Issue 3 , Pages 161-169, May 2009

The hot hand phenomenon as a cognitive adaptation to clumped resources

  • Andreas Wilke

      Affiliations

    • Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, UCLA Department of Anthropology, Los Angeles, CA, USA
    • Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
    • Corresponding Author InformationCorresponding author. Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, 14195 Berlin, Germany. Tel.: +49 30 82406292; fax: +49 30 8249939.
    • ,
  • H. Clark Barrett

      Affiliations

    • Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, UCLA Department of Anthropology, Los Angeles, CA, USA
    • FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Received 5 August 2008; accepted 25 November 2008. published online 14 January 2009.

Abstract 

The hot hand phenomenon refers to the expectation of “streaks” in sequences of hits and misses whose probabilities are, in fact, independent (e.g., coin tosses, basketball shots). Here we propose that the hot hand phenomenon reflects an evolved psychological assumption that items in the world come in clumps, and that hot hand, not randomness, is our evolved psychological default. In two experiments, American undergraduates and Shuar hunter–horticulturalists participated in computer tasks in which they predicted hits and misses in foraging for fruits, coin tosses, and several other kinds of resources whose distributions were generated randomly. Subjects in both populations exhibited the hot hand assumption across all the resource types. The only exception was for American students predicting coin tosses where hot hand was reduced. These data suggest that hot hand is our evolved psychological default, which can be reduced (though not eliminated) by experience with genuinely independent random phenomena like coin tosses.

Keywords: Decision-making, Ecological rationality, Patchy environment, Aggregation, Streaks, Hot hand

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PII: S1090-5138(08)00121-9

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.11.004

Evolution & Human Behavior
Volume 30, Issue 3 , Pages 161-169, May 2009

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