Goal center width, how to count sequences, and the gambler’s fallacy in goal penalty shootouts

Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2019, Vol 14, Issue 1

Abstract

Previous research has reported that the gambler’s fallacy could be detected in goalkeepers’ behavior during penalty shootouts. Following repeated kicks in the same direction, goalkeepers were more likely to dive in the opposite direction on the next kick. We employ here a unique data collection approach and accurately measure the exact location of each ball when crossing the goal plane. This allows us to analyze how different definitions of the goal center width affect the results, and we show that this width indeed affects whether a gambler’s fallacy in goalkeepers’ diving behavior exists. We further augment the data with additional kicks from top international competitions and analyze the extended dataset. We also question whether previous treatments of kicking sequences adequately represent what goalkeepers consider as a run of consecutive kicks to the same side. A different representation of kicking sequences is provided and applied to the data. Overall, we find some evidence for the gambler’s fallacy after sequences of two or three kicks to the same side.

Authors and Affiliations

Simcha Avugos, Ofer H. Azar, Nadav Gavish, Eran Sher and Michael Bar-Eli

Keywords

Related Articles

Risky Decision Making: Testing for Violations of Transitivity Predicted by an Editing Mechanism

Transitivity is the assumption that if a person prefers A to B and B to C, then that person should prefer A to C. This article explores a paradigm in which Birnbaum, Patton and Lott (1999) thought people might be systema...

Metacognitive judgment and denial of deficit: Evidence from frontotemporal dementia

Patients suffering from the behavioral variant of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD-b) often exaggerate their abilities. Are those errors in judgment limited to domains in which patients under-perform, or do FTD-b patients ov...

Bayesian analysis of deterministic and stochastic prisoner’s dilemma games

This paper compares the behavior of individuals playing a classic two-person deterministic prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game with choice data obtained from repeated interdependent security prisoner’s dilemma games with varyin...

Who lies? A large-scale reanalysis linking basic personality traits to unethical decision making

Previous research has established that higher levels of trait Honesty-Humility (HH) are associated with less dishonest behavior in cheating paradigms. However, only imprecise effect size estimates of this HH-cheating lin...

An alternative approach for eliciting willingness-to-pay: A randomized Internet trial

Open-ended methods that elicit willingness-to-pay (WTP) in terms of absolute dollars often result in high rates of questionable and highly skewed responses, insensitivity to changes in health state, and raise an ethical...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP678401
  • DOI -
  • Views 135
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Simcha Avugos, Ofer H. Azar, Nadav Gavish, Eran Sher and Michael Bar-Eli (2019). Goal center width, how to count sequences, and the gambler’s fallacy in goal penalty shootouts. Judgment and Decision Making, 14(1), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-678401