Success breeds success: Physiological, psychological, and economic perspectives of momentum (hot hand)

The literature on momentum (hot hand) is broad and diverse, and is addressed in a range of fields, including sports, marketing, finance, politics, and even warfare. Yet this term is readily (and often uncritically) borrowed across domains, to simply refer to serial dependency in data. As such, researchers may conveniently use the concept of momentum as a framework for study of streakiness in their given field, without specifying that each type of momentum differs greatly in terms of its underlying mechanisms (i.e., mediators). The field of judgment and decision-making (JDM) is an additional domain in which momentum has become a highly debated topic. In this paper, I consider the success-breeds-success phenomenon in sports competitions, and elaborate on three groups of mediators: (1) In biology, researchers are greatly interested in physiological responses to success in agnostic encounters (among both animals and humans), known as the winner effect; (2) In psychology, efficacy, motivation, concentration, and determination have been proposed as mediators of the success-breeds-success phenomenon; (3) In economics, according to game theory, early success in competitions can shift players’ net value of winning, namely, increasing or decreasing incentives for investing additional efforts. Based on these three theoretical perspectives, in this paper I advocate for the use of psychophysiological momentum with regards to sports competitions, while attempting to reconcile the longstanding debate about momentum that is seen in JDM-related literature.