Research by Assistant Professor Nicholas Reinholtz Published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology

Leeds’ Assistant Professor Nicholas Reinholtz, in collaboration with professors from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Georgia Institute of Technology, published a recent paper titled Perceived Momentum Influences Responsibility Judgments. Their research studies how people judge the responsibility of sequential events, such as correct and incorrect guesses, on perceptions of overall outcomes, like winning or losing a trivia game.

Reinholtz and his colleagues note that an important distinction about this study is not to argue the merits of the proverbial hot hand or momentum. Extensive empirical research already exists around this subject. Instead, the focus of this study is responsibility judgments: the way we attribute the success or failure of an outcome to individual events may be partly derived from causal beliefs.

Read the study Perceived momentum influences responsibility judgments here.