Heuristics as beliefs and as behaviors: The adaptiveness of the “hot hand”
Gigerenzer (2000) and Anderson (1990) analyzed reasoning by asking: what are the reasoner’s goals? This emphasizes the adaptiveness of behavior rather than whether a belief is normative. Belief in the “hot hand” in basketball suggests that players experiencing streaks should be given more shots, but...
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Published in | Cognitive psychology Vol. 48; no. 3; pp. 295 - 331 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Amsterdam
Elsevier Inc
01.05.2004
Elsevier Academic Press |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Gigerenzer (2000) and
Anderson (1990) analyzed reasoning by asking: what are the reasoner’s goals? This emphasizes the adaptiveness of behavior rather than whether a belief is normative. Belief in the “hot hand” in basketball suggests that players experiencing streaks should be given more shots, but this has been seen as a fallacy due to
Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky (1985) failure to find dependencies between players’ shots. Based on their findings, I demonstrate by Markov modeling and simulation that streaks are valid allocation cues for deciding who to give shots to, because this behavior achieves the team goal of scoring more. Empirically I show that this adaptive heuristic is supported by the fallacious belief in dependency, more so as skill level increases. I extend the theoretical analysis to identify general conditions under which following streaks should be beneficial. Overall, this approach illustrates the advantages of analyzing reasoning in terms of adaptiveness. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0010-0285 1095-5623 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2003.07.003 |