Chapter 4: Further Reading — How Our Brains Misread Luck

Primary Research Papers

Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., & Tversky, A. (1985). "The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences." Cognitive Psychology, 17(3), 295–314. The original and foundational study. Essential reading both for its findings and for what the subsequent reanalysis revealed about its methods. The paper is clearly written and accessible to readers without advanced statistics backgrounds.

Miller, J. B., & Sanjurjo, A. (2018). "Surprised by the Gambler's and Hot Hand Fallacies? A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers." Econometrica, 86(6), 2019–2047. The landmark reanalysis of the Gilovich et al. study. Requires some statistical background but the abstract and introduction are accessible. The core statistical insight — small-sample bias in finite sequences — is explained in the supplementary materials with worked examples.

Fischhoff, B., & Beyth, R. (1975). "I knew it would happen: Remembered probabilities of once-future things." Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13(1), 1–16. The original hindsight bias study using Nixon's China visit. A classic of the cognitive bias literature.

Chapman, L. J., & Chapman, J. P. (1969). "Illusory correlation as an obstacle to the use of valid psychodiagnostic signs." Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 74(3), 271–280. The original illusory correlation research. Demonstrates the phenomenon in trained clinical psychologists, making it particularly striking.

Dixon, M. J., Harrigan, K. A., Sandhu, R., Collins, K., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2010). "Losses Disguised as Wins in Modern Multi-Line Video Slot Machines." Addiction, 105(10), 1819–1824. Research on near-misses and the psychological effects of "losses disguised as wins" in slot machines. Clear, disturbing, and important.

Books

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The most accessible comprehensive account of cognitive bias research, by Daniel Kahneman, who worked with Tversky. Part III covers probability and luck misperceptions, including discussion of the hot hand research and its context. Essential reading for this course.

Gilovich, T. (1991). How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Free Press. Thomas Gilovich's book-length treatment of cognitive errors, including a full chapter on the hot hand. Readable, well-illustrated, and appropriately humble about the limitations of its own conclusions (this predates the Miller-Sanjurjo reanalysis but is valuable for understanding the original argument fully).

Mlodinow, L. (2008). The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Pantheon Books. A lucid and entertaining book on how randomness shapes outcomes and how humans misperceive it. Covers streaks, the hot hand, and the gambler's fallacy in accessible terms. Good for readers who want more mathematical grounding without a formal statistics background.

Silver, N. (2012). The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don't. Penguin Press. Nate Silver's book on forecasting covers the pattern-in-noise problem across many domains: weather, sports, elections, financial markets. Chapter 4 on baseball statistics is directly relevant to hot hand questions.

Lewis, M. (2016). The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. W.W. Norton. A narrative account of the working relationship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky — the researchers who established much of the cognitive bias framework covered in this chapter. Includes material on the hot hand research and its origins. Excellent for understanding the human story behind the science.

On Social Media Psychology and Variable Ratio Reinforcement

Eyal, N. (2014). Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Portfolio/Penguin. A business-oriented guide to building products that create habits, written from a design perspective. Useful for understanding how variable ratio reinforcement principles are deliberately applied in technology design — though the book's ethical stance is more neutral than the case study above.

Harris, T. (2016). "How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind — From a Magician and Google Design Ethicist." Medium. Tristan Harris's influential essay on the behavioral manipulation embedded in technology design, including social media feeds. Freely available online. A good introduction to the ethical dimensions of the design issues covered in Case Study 2.

Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Penguin Press. Comprehensive account of behavioral addiction and technology design. Covers slot machines, social media, video games, and their shared behavioral architecture. Strong on the neuroscience of reward and variable ratio reinforcement.

On the Science of Coincidence and Superstition

Wiseman, R. (2003). The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life. Hyperion. Richard Wiseman's research on why some people are luckier than others. Chapter 2 covers superstition and the cognitive errors that reinforce it. Good empirical grounding with readable presentation.

Shermer, M. (2011). The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. Times Books. A wide-ranging account of how belief formation works, with particular attention to patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise). Covers pareidolia, apophenia, and their relationship to supernatural and superstitious beliefs.

For Further Study: Statistical Foundations

Freedman, D., Pisani, R., & Purves, R. (2007). Statistics (4th ed.). W.W. Norton. The most conceptually rigorous introductory statistics textbook available without prerequisites. Chapter 24 on the law of averages and Chapter 25 on the expected value are directly relevant to understanding why hot hand beliefs and the gambler's fallacy are both wrong in different ways.

Taleb, N. N. (2001). Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. Texere. Nassim Taleb's first book, focused specifically on how randomness is underappreciated in financial markets and how confirmation bias and narrative construction lead to false pattern beliefs. Sometimes strident in tone, but the core arguments are important.

Video and Podcast Resources

"The Hot Hand Is Real" — Episode of FiveThirtyEight's podcast. An accessible audio discussion of the Miller-Sanjurjo reanalysis and its implications for sports analytics and beyond.

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" lecture series by Daniel Kahneman — available via YouTube. Several recorded lectures from Kahneman's own courses are publicly available and provide direct engagement with the cognitive bias research covered in this chapter.

"The Social Dilemma" (2020, Netflix documentary). Features interviews with former technology designers, including Tristan Harris, on the behavioral engineering of social media platforms. More polemical than academic but useful for understanding the ethical landscape around variable ratio reinforcement in technology.

Note: All academic papers cited in this course can typically be accessed through your institution's library database. For papers behind paywalls, Google Scholar often links to legally available preprint versions. The authors of behavioral economics papers regularly post working papers on their personal university websites.