Althought the sports scene is in hiatus, I thought you might be interested in some science. Sports science, that is.

If you play sports, you may have been lucky enough to feel the hot hand.

It’s a mental and physical phenomena when everything you do clicks. You shoot and the ball clears the basket, nothing but net. In golf, your long putt unbelievably sinks.

Name a sport and at times you have the hot hand or are in ‘the zone’. Everything is going right as it has for local high school teams like Dutch Fork in football and Gray Collegiate boys in hoops.

What it is

To have the hot hand is to achieve an elevated state in which you feel superhuman. Sportswriter Ben Cohan believes there is not a more pleasurable sensation – with your clothes on. The ethereal feeling of having the hot hand exists in nearly every industry and touches nearly everybody.

But one curious thing about the hot hand: It isn’t supposed to exist.

The hot hand has been studied by scholars, brilliant minds and Nobel Prize winners for nearly 40 years.

An intellectual battle began in 1985 with a paper called “The hot hand in basketball”. It focused on the misperception of random sequences now known as behavioral economics.

This revealed a dangerous bias – that we see patterns where they don’t exist.

That means no hot hand.

A seductive idea

Researchers Tom Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky studied how this applies to basketball.

You’ve sunk a few shots in a row and believe you’re more likely to sink your next shot because you’ve made those previous shots.

They also looked at everything from how we manage money to how we make decisions - all having to do with the hot hand.

What the psychologists behind the paper didn’t realize was they had stumbled upon a seductive idea that would follow them forever.

Biased research

The most significant breakthrough came from young American economists who looked at the hot hand and saw a statistical bias that others had missed.

In correcting the math, they calculated a hot hand has always existed. This made sense to those who believed early research misread randomness.

What they are not saying is the role confidence plays in having the hot hand. Without confidence you can make it, you wouldn’t try tough shots anyway.

Do you believe the hot hand exists? I want to hear from you.

The Sports Grouch welcomes your email at ChronicleSports@yahoo.com .