THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYEngland.” Tough thinking, meanwhile, was characterized by astute
decision-making at critical moments in a match, honest self-appraisal
and overcoming self-doubt.
In another study, Maurizio Bertollo of the Gabriele d’Annunzio
University of Chieti-Pescara interviewed thirteen members of Italy’s
2004 Olympic pentathlon squad about their thought processes during
the shooting event. Several of the athletes said that when they stopped
concentrating on making the best possible shot and focused instead on
not making a bad shot, this often had the opposite effect and resulted
in them doing just that. Bertollo said this was an example of the “ironic
effects” that can be caused by how an athlete is thinking.
This tallies with other research which indicates that thinking too
much about an already mastered technique can be counter-productive.
In a 2008 study, Daniel Gucciardi asked twenty experienced golfers to
perform putts in one of three ways. In the first – designed to make them
conscious of elements of their technique – they had to focus on the
words “arms”, “weight” and “head”; in the second they simply focused on
Why your team should wear red
Teams or individuals who wear red seem to be at an advantage.
Psychologists have looked at past records in English football and found
that teams who wear red do better than average. Other researchers have
focused on taekwondo contests in which one competitor wears red
while the other wears blue. If the fight is one-sided, colours don’t make
any difference. But in closely-fought bouts, the combatant wearing red is
significantly more likely to win. In a striking demonstration of this effect,
Norbert Hagemann at the University of Münster asked experienced
referees to score taekwondo contestants seen in a series of video clips.
When Hagemann used digital trickery to switch the colours worn by the
fighters, he found that the referees scored the same fighter’s perform-
ance more generously when he wore red than when he wore white.
Why does Tiger Woods always wear a red shirt on the final day of
tournaments? Perhaps he’s been reading up on the research. Red is
also associated with dominance in the animal kingdom – male Mandrill
monkeys, for example, get redder when they’re angry and the reddest
individual in a face-off tends to win. It’s an association we’ve inherited and
still subscribe to, albeit subconsciously. In a revealing study conducted by
Anthony Little and Russell Hill, participants were presented with pairs
of circles or squares, one red, one blue, and had to say which shape
was more dominant and aggressive, and which would win in a physical
competition. The participants overwhelmingly chose the red shape.