The ‘hot hand’ and the gambler’s fallacy: why our brains struggle to believe in randomness

By Milad Haghani, Senior Lecturer of Urban Risk & Resilience, UNSW Sydney

We are surrounded by random events every day. Will the stock market rise or fall tomorrow? Will the next penalty kick in a soccer match go left or right? Will your lottery ticket finally win?

Often, we experience these events not as isolated occurrences but as part of a sequence. In these sequences, our brains crave certainty and patterns.

Sometimes there really is something meaningful behind the patterns we observe. But often, we’re simply reading into randomness.

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