Hot hand fallacy

Biological Parallel

Honeybees that find nectar in clustered flowers recruit more foragers to the patch—success predicts more success because resources clump non-randomly in nature. From berry patches to salmon runs, biological resources exhibit true positive autocorrelation. Humans correctly detect these streaks but misapply the pattern to independent trials: a basketball player's 'hot hand' feels real because most evolutionary payoffs (finding another antelope near the first) exhibited genuine clustering. Sports are the anomaly—independent shot probabilities—but our Pleistocene pattern detectors can't tell the difference.