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The diving bias

by Tom Nuttall / November 29, 2007 / Leave a comment
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England have lost on penalties at five of the nine last major international football championships. So here’s some interesting news for whoever picks up the poisoned chalice from Steve McLaren—after analysing hours of footage, a team of psychologists in Israel have discovered the optimum strategy for a goalkeeper facing a penalty: don’t move. The team found that keepers who stayed in the centre of the goalmouth saved roughly a third of the penalties they faced, while those jumping to the left or right saved no more than one in eight.

Yet in 94 per cent of the penalties watched by the researchers, the keeper chose to dive left or right. Why do so few choose to follow the optimal strategy? The researchers attribute the failing to a cognitive bias; specifically the well-known omission bias. The effect of the omission bias is that following some kind of negative outcome—like letting in a penalty—we feel worse if we did nothing to stop it happening than if we did something.

This has a superficial plausibility—the effects of cognitive biases on our behaviour can be very powerful, even in instances when they would seem to work against our interests. Yet we are not slaves to our biases, and when the dividend that would accrue from overcoming one—such as a goalkeeper more than doubling his chances of saving a penalty—is sufficiently high, one would expect the motivation to be there.

Perhaps the explanation has more to do with football’s traditional antipathy to stats-based analysis. In stark contrast to baseball, where some managers have managed to revolutionise their team’s performances by basing team selections and match tactics on particular statistics, football seems to have little time for number-crunchers. TV pundits and newspaper reports hurl statistics at us, but rarely make serious attempts to thin…

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Comments

  1. Tim Wilkinson
    November 29, 2007 at 19:28
    Surely saving a penalty is the ultimate accolade that can be granted to any serious footie player by the heavenly powers, powers that ultimately guide our steerage on a football pitch, to cite the words of Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. Anyone who has accomplished this nigh impossible feat will know that it is a question of psychology - that much our Israeli friends have down correctly - but it is often a question of psyching out the striker taking the penalty as well as of anticipating his move on the ball. A goalkeeper that saves a penalty for the England Squad should be granted a knighthood ipso facto. As to what the next England coach can do to return the country to the glory days of Gordon Banks - this we cannot divine from the fates above the pitch at Wembley - but it is a sure fire thing that there is someone out there, someone much better than Banksie, who knows he can be the divinely-touched goalkeeper that can save England for the next World Cup. With an unbeatable goalie, this team could become invincible - and yes it is all a question of the psychology of knowing that the supply train and the home base are impregnable. Tim Wilkinson
  2. Christian Jarrett
    November 30, 2007 at 00:20
    Hi There I wrote the report on the BPS Research Digest about this study. I found out today that I misquoted the percentage regarding how often keepers jumped. I should have said 93.7 per cent, not 97.7 per cent. I just wanted let you know. Thanks for linking to the Research Digest blog! Christian Jarrett
  3. Tom Nuttall
    November 30, 2007 at 13:15
    Now updated - thanks Christian.

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Tom Nuttall
Tom Nuttall is Europe channel editor at the Economist
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