Perceiving and believing but not knowing

But would the well-informed coach change his tactics?

Just like our perception of the table persists after we learn that it is wrong, a basketball coach may persist in perceiving a hot hand after he has learned that there is no such thing.

The two tables show that our perception, leading to a belief, can be wrong. It also shows that once we are aware of it being wrong, it doesn't change our perception. Our false perception remains.

Not only do wrong perceptions lead to false beliefs, factual knowledge may be powerless to change those false beliefs and misperceptions.

Editor for Wired magazine and author of books on creativity and decision making Jonah Lehrer comments: "Even though I know all about Tversky and Gilovich's research – and fully believe the data – I still perceive the hot hand."Just like you and I continue to perceive the tables as different.

Even when the scoring percentage of the "hot-hand" drops (as it will), 'hot players' score more than other players simply because they are presented with more opportunities than their teammates after their initial lucky sequence. After the game, confirmation-bias is likely to kick-in: attention is directed away from scoring percentages and towards the total number of baskets made. The hot-streak player still comes out on top, even though her percentage may be below average. Actually the confirmation bias had already kicked in when we first suspected seeing the hot hand because during the game we were ignoring the misses and focusing on the scores made by the 'hot-hand'. Who is going to criticize the top-scorer or the coach who made the decision to have 'assists' directed to the top-scorer?

Confronted with proof that the hot streak is an illusion, many reject the facts and persist in their superstition. Many coaches today still stand by the hot hand illusion. Red Auerbach, the legendary coach of the Celtics, simply ignored the findings: "So he makes a study, I couldn't care less."³

The illusion persists like the illusion of the table above, except that we have learned to dismiss our intuitive perception of the table. Dismissing intuitive perception, however, is the exception rather then the rule. With regards to our mental models, what we know is often sidelined in favour of intuition.

The persistent confidence in the hot streak is not confined to the basketball field:

- a sales-person who closes three deals in a row gets the better quality and larger quantity of prospects and is therefore more likely to win the top sales award and a self-perpetuating cycle is put into motion, resulting in hero sales-reps;

- a stock-trader who selected a sequence of winning stocks gets more money and more latitude to invest;

- a CEO who headed two successful companies is expected to turn around the next company she heads;

- punters in the casino often keep an eye out for a player on a hot streak and once identified, they put their money with this "hot player", ...

If we refuse to check our beliefs then we are more likely to go down the path of overconfident decision-making (but that is for another article).

I hope that you now are aware, like Descartes, that our senses cannot be trusted blindly (no pun intended) and that we'd be wise to verify what we hear, see, read, smell, feel and believe. We can do worse than to follow president Reagan's advise when he famously said "Trust but verify".