Clustering illusion

Clustering illusion is the cognitive bias of seeing a pattern in what is actually a random sequence of numbers or events. It is a type of apophenia related to the gambler's fallacy.

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A simple way to understand this illusion is to imagine casting ten pennies in a one foot square space. Unless all of the pennies fall in an exactly even distribution, which is extremely improbable, some pennies will be closer to each other than others and seem to form a cluster or group solely from the random distribution.

It's sometimes called the "hot hand fallacy" due to the belief common among basketball coaches and players that it was best to use players on a hot streak (i.e., those who had a "hot hand"). A study demonstrated that the hot hand was a matter of coaches picking a short run of baskets out of a larger sequence that was more or less random.[1] Though there some dispute that the researchers defined "hot hand" (i.e., making exactly 1 basket following another) differently than basketball players actually conceptualize it (in a vaguer sense).[2]

Randomness is not such an intuitive concept for humans. In addition to being poor at recognizing random sequences for what they are, people are also bad at generating random numbers.[3]

See also

References
  1. Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky. The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences. Cognitive Psychology vol. 17, pp. 295-314, 1985.
  2. Scientists who claim ‘hot hand’ is a myth have never had one by Tom Siegfried
  3. Random Number, Wolfram Math
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