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In this World Cup year, when soccer passions are running high, supporters are likely to object to every foul decision against their team. But they might also have a point.
A colleague from the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Steffen Giessner and I have researched all recorded fouls in three major football competitions over seven years. We discovered an ambiguous foul is more likely to be attributed to the taller of two players.
We began our research by transferring our insights from decision making in business into the arena of sports. Specifically, we wanted to investigate whether people consider the available information in ambiguous foul situations in an unbiased, i.e. subconsciously unprejudiced, way. Based on evolutionary and linguistic research which has revealed that people associate the size of others with concepts such as aggression and dominance, we assumed that humans are unlikely to be unbiased information processors.
We specifically chose soccer as the context of our studies because the sport often yields ambiguous foul situations in which it is difficult to determine the perpetrator. In such situations, people must rely on their “instincts” to make a call, which should increase the use and thus the detectability of a player’s height as an additional decision cue.
To put our assumption to a test, we acquired foul data recorded by Impire AG. It encompassed all fouls committed in seven seasons of UEFA Champions League (32,142 fouls) and German Bundesliga (85,262 fouls), the last three FIFA World Cups (6,440 fouls). For all seasons, leagues, and data collection methods, our analyses revealed the same picture confirming our initial assumption: taller people are indeed more often held accountable for fouls than shorter ones. However, just based upon this field data we were unable to ultimately determine whether there is a systematic foul attribution bias against taller players or whether taller players in fact commit more fouls.
That’s why we conducted two additional perception experiments (with soccer fans) in which we showed two players of different height running towards a ball in the middle of the picture. Here, no actual foul was committed. Thus taller players could not actually foul more. We framed these pictures with stories (so called scenarios) and then asked about participants’ foul perceptions. The results clearly show that participants are more inclined to anticipate the taller player to foul the smaller. Also, if we told them that the taller player would be laying on the ground after the portrayed scene, they post-hoc attributed it to chance or a dive, however, when we told them that the smaller player would lie on the ground, participants post-hoc attributed it to a foul by the taller player.
Together, this led us to conclude that, even if we take out actual foul behavior, people still have a tendency to attribute the foul to the taller of two players.
This respective article was published in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology: van Quaquebeke, N., & Giessner, S. (2010). How embodied cognitions affect judgments: Height-related attribution bias in football foul calls. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 32(1), 3-22.
but can also be found for free on http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1542487.
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