THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYshots at goal, then their chances of scoring on their next attempt is raised
compared with if they’d just had two misses.
In fact, when researchers looked at the historical record, they mostly
found no evidence for hot streaks whatsoever. A player is just as likely
to make the basket after two preceding misses than after two preceding
scores. Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University was the first to show this,
in a 1985 study in which he looked in detail at the scoring records of nine
members of the 1980–81 Philadelphia 76ers.
Similar findings have emerged for golf, with players on the PGA
tour just as likely to score par or better after scoring above par on the
preceding hole than after scoring below par. And it also applies to tennis,
darts, bowling and other sports. Why do we continue to believe in hot
streaks when the idea appears to have no basis in reality? Psychologists
think it probably has to do with our misunderstanding of randomness.
We expect hits and misses to alternate more evenly than they do, so that
How to save a penalty
The penalty shoot-out, used to settle drawn matches in international
football competitions, must be one of the most nerve-wracking situa-
tions in sport. It’s a tense one-on-one situation in which a player must
get the ball past the opposition’s goalkeeper with one kick from the
penalty spot.
According to sports psychologist Geir Jordet of the Norwegian School
of Sports Sciences, one possible key to success is for the player taking
the kick to take his time. In 2009, Jordet analysed all previous penalty
shoot-outs in major international competitions and found that players
who rushed to take a penalty were at a distinct disadvantage. Those who
took less than 200 milliseconds to respond to the ref ’s whistle scored, on
average, just under 57 percent of the time. By contrast, those who took
more than a second to respond averaged a success rate of eighty percent.
Jordet thinks that a penalty taken too quickly could be a sign of “self-
regulatory breakdown”, in which intense stress causes the player to want
to escape the situation as quickly as possible. Other research has shown
that players who fixate on the goalie are less likely to score. The trick is
to ignore the goalie and focus instead on where you want the ball to go.
What about psychology-inspired advice for goalkeepers?
Apparently they should try staying in the middle of the goal more
often, rather than jumping. In 2007, Michael Bar-Eli from Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev watched hours of archival footage and noticed
that goalkeepers saved many more penalties when they stayed in the
middle of the goal, rather than jumping to the left or right. Despite this
apparent advantage, Bar-Eli found that most often – 93.7 percent of