Bronte Media

I stumbled across a fascinating study that examined the choice goalkeepers make when trying to save a penalty. The result? Goalkeepers should stay put but they don’t.

There is actually two choices a goalkeeper faces if he chooses to move: To jump or stay still and then secondly to jump left or right.

The authors propose that this is because “the norm is to jump, norm theory (Kahneman and Miller, 1986) 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.”

What happens though, is that roughly equally the kicker chooses right, center and left but the goalkeeper chooses to jump right or left 94% of the time. As humans we’d rather be wrong with action than wrong without action.

The full study can be downloaded here.

p.s. I decided to setup a slinkset.com, a white-label digg provider, account and focus on Quantitative Sports (a.k.a Moneyball for all sports). I registered the domain, playistics.com, for $7, the account is free and the design is simple and very customizable.

Highly recommend the experience so far so if you want an easy way to setup such a thing, go for it. And if you are interested in the moneyball of sports, please post articles to www.playistics.com