Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks

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Abstract

In soccer penalty kicks, goalkeepers choose their action before they can clearly observe the kick direction. An analysis of 286 penalty kicks in top leagues and championships worldwide shows that given the probability distribution of kick direction, the optimal strategy for goalkeepers is to stay in the goal’s center. Goalkeepers, however, almost always jump right or left. We propose the following explanation for this behavior: because the norm is to jump, norm theory (Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136–153) implies that a goal scored yields worse feelings for the goalkeeper following inaction (staying in the center) than following action (jumping), leading to a bias for action. The omission bias, a bias in favor of inaction, is reversed here because the norm here is reversed – to act rather than to choose inaction. The claim that jumping is the norm is supported by a second study, a survey conducted with 32 top professional goalkeepers. The seemingly biased decision making is particularly striking since the goalkeepers have huge incentives to make correct decisions, and it is a decision they encounter frequently. Finally, we discuss several implications of the action/omission bias for economics and management.

Introduction

According to the classical assumptions in economics, when people face decision problems involving uncertainty, they should choose what to do according to their utility from the possible outcomes and the probability distribution of outcomes that follows each possible action. How an outcome comes about should not matter. For example, suppose that the decision maker has two possible actions, A and B, and he prefers the probability distribution of outcomes that follows A over the one that follows B. If in a different problem the decision maker has possible actions X and Y that lead to the same distributions of outcomes as A and B, respectively, then the decision maker should choose X.

Many studies involving subjective judgment of decision outcomes, however, found that the evaluation of an outcome depends not only on the outcome itself, but also on the way in which this outcome came about. Kahneman and Tversky (1982), in a seminal article, found that people feel a more poignant emotional reaction to bad outcomes that result from action relative to otherwise identical outcomes that result from inaction.1 The different emotional reaction to outcomes depending on whether they come from action or inaction was later replicated in many other studies (see for example Landman, 1987, Ritov and Baron, 1990, Ritov and Baron, 1992, Ritov and Baron, 1995, Kordes-de Vaal, 1996, Patt and Zeckhauser, 2000, Kruger et al., 2005), and was referred to in the literature in several terms, including emotional amplification, the action bias, the action effect, the inaction effect, the actor effect, and the omission bias (for a detailed review of this literature, see Anderson, 2003).

Kahneman and Miller (1986) proposed the norm theory to explain the above phenomenon. According to this theory, negative outcomes are perceived as worse when people can easily imagine that a better outcome could have occurred. They further assume that in general it is easier to mentally “undo” an action that had occurred than to imagine having taken an action when none had occurred. Consequently, the reaction to outcomes of action is stronger than the reaction to outcomes of inaction (also referred to in the literature as “omissions”). Consistent with this proposal, Ritov and Baron showed, in a series of investigations, that people tend to judge acts that are harmful (relative to the alternative option) as worse than omissions that are equally harmful or even more harmful (for a review, see Baron, 1994).

Almost all the literature so far has studied cases in which people are biased in favor of inaction. The explanation of Kahneman and Miller (1986) for this bias is based on the idea that people can more easily imagine the alternative to action than to inaction, because inaction is often the norm. In cases in which action becomes more normal, however, we might expect, according to the rationale behind the norm theory, that the opposite bias would occur: people would be biased in favor of action when both action and inaction might lead to the same negative outcome. Confirming this prediction – and in line with some previous research (Ritov and Baron, 1990, Spranca et al., 1991) – Ritov and Baron (1994) demonstrated that when action was more expected than inaction, adverse outcomes of failure to act were judged worse than (identical) outcomes of action (see also Miller & Taylor, 1995). Similarly, Zeelenberg, van den Bos, van Dijk, and Pieters (2002) argue that action might be more normal than inaction when we consider previous outcomes; in particular, they claim that when a soccer team loses by a large margin, it becomes more normal for the coach to act in the next game (replace players in the opening team) than not to act (keep the same players), a claim that is supported by their experimental findings.

Most studies on the action/omission bias2 used hypothetical questions, where decisions do not bear real consequences for the subjects. A few exceptions are worth mentioning. Davis, Lehman, Wortman, Silver, and Thompson (1995) examine perceptions after loss of a child or a spouse. Zeelenberg and Pieters (2004) study the participation in lotteries in The Netherlands. Kruger et al. (2005) look at the decision whether to change a previous answer on a multiple-choice test, and Pieters and Zeelenberg (2005) examine voting in the national elections in The Netherlands.

Because we believe that the action/omission bias has important implications for economics, and because many economists are skeptic regarding experiments that lack salient financial incentives (even though in psychology it is a common practice to conduct such experiments), we attempt to observe whether an action bias exists in a real-world situation, where incentives are huge: the behavior of elite goalkeepers during penalty kicks.3 Moreover, goalkeepers face penalty kicks regularly, so they are not only highly-motivated decision-makers, but also very experienced ones in the domain of the decision they have to make. The norm for goalkeepers in penalty kicks is to act (jump to the right or to the left), leading us to predict, based on the norm theory, a bias towards action. Indeed, we find that while on average, given the behavior of kickers, it is optimal for the goalkeeper to choose to stay in the center of the goal (which can be considered inaction), goalkeepers almost always jump to the right or to the left, thus exhibiting a bias towards action.

Recently, two other papers that address the behavior of players during penalty kicks have been published. Chiappori, Levitt, and Groseclose (2002) examine the question whether kickers and goalkeepers play the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium (MSNE). They show that several predictions that should hold if the MSNE is played are indeed supported by their data. It seems at first that our result (using a different dataset) of a bias in goalkeepers’ behavior contradicts their conclusion. In their data, however, only in about 2% of the penalty kicks the goalkeeper chose to stay in the center, so their result, that play is consistent with the MSNE concept, is based almost entirely on the choice between right and left, and not on the choice between the center and the sides. Consequently, our result is not a contradiction of theirs. Palacios-Huerta (2003) also studies penalty kicks. In his empirical analysis, however, he analyzes a 2X2 game, in which kickers and goalkeepers can choose either right or left. His results suggest that in the choice between right and left, goalkeepers and kickers play in accordance with the MSNE predictions. Because he analyzes a 2X2 game, however, he cannot detect whether there is a bias in the choice of center vs. the sides, which is the focus of our research.

The rest of the article is organized as follows. The next section gives some background on penalty kicks and describes our predictions. Section 3 presents the first study, in which we examine the behavior of kickers and goalkeepers during penalty kicks. Section 4 presents the second study, a survey conducted with elite professional goalkeepers about their attitudes and perceptions regarding penalty kicks. Section 5 concludes and offers a few possible implications of the action/omission bias for economics and management.

Section snippets

Soccer, penalty kicks, and potential biases

In a penalty kick, the kicker shoots a stationary ball located 11 m from the goal, against only a goalkeeper (no other players are allowed to stand in the way), who must remain on the goal-line until the kick is taken. This suggests that it is hard to stop a penalty kick, and indeed in our data about 80% of the penalty kicks resulted in a goal being scored. Penalty kicks in soccer are used in two cases. First, they are used as a means to determine the winner in certain championships, when the

The data

To determine whether soccer goalkeepers exhibit the action bias and jump during penalty kicks more than is optimal, we needed data on actual behavior of kickers and goalkeepers during penalty kicks. To obtain such data, we searched in the archives of various television channels, found different soccer matches in the top leagues and championships worldwide, and watched the games to see whether they involved penalty kicks. For those penalty kicks that we found, we asked three independent judges

Study 2: Goalkeepers’ attitudes

Our explanation discussed above for the seemingly non-optimal decision making by goalkeepers is based on the argument that the norm is to jump to one of the sides rather than to stay in the center. While it is evident from the data that goalkeepers almost always jump to one of the sides and therefore this can be considered the norm, we wanted to test the assertion that jumping is the norm directly, by asking the top professional goalkeepers for their opinion. Since getting such top goalkeepers

Conclusion

We hypothesized that soccer goalkeepers jump to the sides during penalty kicks more than they should. The analysis of 286 penalty kicks in various soccer games in top leagues and championships worldwide shows that while the utility-maximizing behavior for goalkeepers is to stay in the goal’s center during the kick, in 93.7% of the kicks the goalkeepers chose to jump to their right or left. This non-optimal behavior suggests that a bias in goalkeepers’ decision making might be present. According

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Editor David Hardman and to three anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments, and to Galit Dori for helpful research assistance. We also thank the goalkeepers who agreed to dedicate their valuable time and participate in our study.

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