Comment on Koehler and Conley / 167 167 JOURNAL OF SPORT & EXERCISE PSYCHOLOGY, 2004, 26, 167-170 © 2004 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. Hot Hand Belief and Hot Hand Behavior: A Comment on Koehler and Conley Bartosz Gula Markus Raab University of Klagenfurt University of Flensburg In our comment on Koehler and Conley’s (2003) findings on the “hot hand” belief, we want to emphasize the different conclusions that can be drawn from their results by applying the concept of ecological rationality. The choice of environmental contexts and structures imposes constraints on possible inter- pretations of the results obtained. Differentiating between the cognitive and behavioral levels of the phenomenon seems analytically useful, particularly if practical recommendations to professionals are to be made. The implications of Koehler and Conley’s data, new evidence, and the relationship between the perceived streaks of players and their base rates are discussed with the aim of developing empirically founded recommendations to professionals in sports, especially in real game situations. Key Words: basketball, streaks, base rate, adaptiveness, ecological rationality Koehler and Conley (2003) have provided new evidence in the ongoing study of the detection of dependency in performance streaks. Research on the “hot hand” belief, the belief that “an athlete’s performance temporarily increases beyond his or her base rate following a string of successes” (p. 253), has prompted many studies whose findings are being generalized from the original sport studied, basket- ball (Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985), to other sports such as baseball, volley- ball, and horseshoe pitching. Furthermore, the results are being used to examine questions in other academic fields such as economics (Hendricks, Jayendu, & Zeckhauser, 1993) and cognitive science. Here we focus on two broad questions: Does success breed success and failure breed failure? What are the consequences of a behavior that is influenced by the mistakenly perceived dependence of future success on past streaks? By comparing expected and actual runs, Koehler and Conley (2003) de- tected no unusual streaks of success and no sequential dependency in the shooting performance of 23 participants in the NBA long-distance shootout contests (1994– 1997) except for two players, Anderson and Scott. The claim of sequential depen- dency as an interpretation of the belief has been studied extensively, and there seems to be agreement that consecutive successful shots (hits) are often not posi- Bartosz Gula is with the Dept. of Psychology, University of Klagenfurt, Universitätsstr. 65-67, A-9020 Klagenfurt, Austria; Markus Raab is with the Institute for Movement Sciences and Sport, University of Flensburg, Auf dem Campus 1, D-24943 Flensburg, Germany. COM M ENT