Hot Hand Phenomena in Artistic, Cultural, and Scientific Careers

The hot hand phenomenon, loosely defined as winning begets more winnings, highlights a specific period during which an individual's performance is substantially higher than her typical performance. While widely debated in sports, gambling, and financial markets over the past several decades, little is known if the hot hand phenomenon applies to individual careers. Here, building on rich literature on lifecycle of creativity, we collected large-scale career histories of individual artists, movie directors and scientists, tracing the artworks, movies, and scientific publications they produced. We find that, across all three domains, hit works within a career show a high degree of temporal regularity, each career being characterized by bursts of high-impact works occurring in sequence. We demonstrate that these observations can be explained by a simple hot-hand model we developed, allowing us to probe quantitatively the hot hand phenomenon governing individual careers, which we find to be remarkably universal across diverse domains we analyzed: The hot-hand phenomenon is ubiquitous yet unique across different careers. While the vast majority of individuals have at least one hot-hand period, hot hands are most likely to occur only once. The hot-hand period emerges randomly within an individual's sequence of works, is temporally localized, and is unassociated with any detectable change in productivity. We show that, since works produced during hot hand garner significantly more impact, the uncovered hot-hand phenomenon fundamentally drives the collective impact of an individual, ignoring which leads us to systematically over- or under-estimate the future impact of a career. These results not only deepen our quantitative understanding of patterns governing individual ingenuity and success, they may also have implications for decisions and policies involving predicting and nurturing individuals