A UNIVERSITY once did a study of almost 300 penalties taken in soccer and concluded that while goalkeepers will typically either jump left or right in an attempt to make a save, the optimal strategy is actually to stay put, in the centre of the goal.
So why do keepers move? You can easily imagine that the reaction of the crowd plays a part. While it’s easy to pontificate post-match in the pub, after a Panenka has been scored, that the keeper simply should have stayed where he was (and that’s what you would have done, for sure), decision making in the heat of the moment is usually less nuanced. With the crowd on your back as a keeper you feel the need to do something, make an effort, take a guess and throw your body one way or the other.
It’s can also be natural for supporters to then forgive a keeper more easily for simply guessing the wrong side, as long as they had made an attempt to make a save, as opposed to simply not moving.
In the same fashion the study suggested that it was more normal for a keeper themselves to feel less bad about failing to save the penalty if they proactively tried to do something about it in order to make a save, than to risk having done nothing and the penalty being scored.
This is what is known as action bias. The idea that doing something is better than doing nothing. Even in cases where there is no evidence to support that doing something will make any noticeable difference, or where the evidence in fact suggests doing nothing will create a more preferable outcome.
Action bias is everywhere. How many times do we see politicians introduce legislation that may never get passed in the long run, or take years to make any difference, but they leverage and campaign on it at the time like it’s the Paris Peace Treaties, because they need to show the voters they are ’taking action now’.
By doing this we feel like we are in control. We aren’t waiting for circumstances or action by others to affect change: By proactively doing something, anything, we maintain the feeling that we shape our own destiny.
It happens all the time in work too. We review a process or decision and feel pressure to introduce some form of change, no matter how small, unnecessary, or just plain pointless that change is. We feel like we need to justify what we’ve been doing with some form of proactive outcome.
How many independent audits or consultancy reports do you get where you are advised everything is 100 per cent and nothing needs done? Very few I would guess. There is always at least some small justification for a change being introduced, some re-labelling or superficial alteration just to make the auditors (and the client) feel like money and time has not been wasted.
Sometimes we feel the need to respond quickly because of who the person is. Get an email from the chief executive asking you to change their bank details and you rush to action it before realising it’s a phishing attack. It doesn’t have to be a big decision, just something that you feel compelled to ‘do something’ with.
Even in everyday conversation we hear that ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’. Action bias can lead to rash judgements, and ill-conceived plans being enacted. We need to be careful.
The flip side is that we cannot, as the old saying goes, allow perfect to be the enemy of good. In many cases if we have a base case for action, we should move on it when we have sufficient strategy, planning or resources to be good enough. The danger of waiting until everything is 100 per cent is that nothing will ever be perfect. The wind always changes, some other factor comes into play, we are always waiting on just one more person to come back to us, a final piece of data required and we procrastinate and delay and drag our heels so much that nothing happens.
Clearly, it’s a risk-based decision. If it’s low risk then we are probably ok to just press on. High risk, then maybe we need to take a breath, pause and get as much right before pressing ‘go’.
And next time we get ready to shout at a keeper for not moving as a forward rolls the penalty into the far corner we should cut them some slack. They could just have been acknowledging action bias and playing the percentages.
:: Barry Shannon is head of HR at STATSports
