Bird brains
Superstition and cognitive bias in hockey coaching?
Though I no longer work in an academic environment I still receive email feeds that contain the content alerts for various journals in the areas in which I used to be involved. Most of these are on ecology, animal behaviour and applied ecology fields but I also get the content update of a number of sports science journals.
The other day, popping into my inbox, was the new article alert from the Journal of Sport Sciences (JSS). Sport science isn’t one of the highest impact science research areas but within its niche the JSS is one of the better periodicals. One article in the alert deals with an area I have always been curious about and was titled: “Understanding the use of superstitious rituals in sports people1.”
The paper gives a good overview of superstitious rituals and in particular the creation and origin of of superstitious behaviour (p.7, Theme 2: The Life cycle of superstitious rituals) with some original work based on interviews with players from a variety of sports (naturally not hockey - no sports science research is done on hockey).
One reason for my interest is that I grew up playing a lot of tennis2, one of those individual sports that puts a lot of emphasis on the psychological part of the game. Any kink, any behavioural quirk that might seem to give an advantage was always tempting to adopt. Did I win that quarter final because I was listening to the Pixies before I started, because I was wearing odd socks, my watch on the inside of my wrist? Perhaps I should always queue up Black Francis before a match. I’m not sure I have noticed this in hockey but if you watch football many of the players will enter the pitch with a hop, a shuffle, a formalised two step, touch the ground, point two fingers to the sky or some other ritualised behaviour. Some of this might have a formal religious connection3 but much of it seems to operate at the same level as pigeons.
B. F. Skinner is regularly cited whenever this subject rears its head. If you haven’t come across it before it is well worth reading about his experimental work on operant conditioning with pigeons4. There’s a good explanatory video here but in brief, Skinner showed that pigeons would develop ‘superstitious’ behaviours in an attempt to make a food tray appear. The superstitions seemed to develop because the birds had made some sort of stereotypic movement (turn to one side, lower their head, lift a foot) just before the food tray appeared (it was on a timer), so they subsequently kept making and accentuating the same behaviour in the ‘belief’ that this action was causing the food tray’s appearance. Bizarre really, but this essentially the same as an example in the paper of a player who kisses a piece of his jewellery before a game, subsequently plays well, and so persists with the behaviour. As the player says:
“I did it before a game once, I don’t really know why but I just did it one time and I remember playing really, really well, like one of my best performances, so from then on I just kept doing it.”
I find this ritualisation of behaviours, the willing adoption of an obvious placebo, fascinating.
For example, does going first in a shootout really result in more wins? Or is it something we have latched onto as a psychological crutch, a superstition about the nature of shootouts - “thou must go first to reach the next round”. The same question gets asked of football and tennis where, in the latter, serving first is seen as an advantage. It isn’t - it’s just perceived that way. And while there have been some studies showing benefits of going first in football, subsequent re-analyses have shown this not to be the case. Nor is it the case in hockey. An earlier analysis I did (which I should redo for these pages with updated data) showed there was no effect in the men’s game and a weak, non-significant trend in the women’s5. And yet we persist because, because, well why? It feels good to have a focal point rather than accepting that the outcome of a shootout might be random?
In connection, I am also interested in how this leaks into another very relevant area for coaches - that of cognitive biases and how they may influence our decisions and the feedback we give. Biases are rife in our daily lives and they will obviously influence the coaching process. One can easily imagine recency bias, the state of giving more attention to things that happened a short time ago, having a role in what we communicate during quarter, half and three-quarter time breaks or in feed-back to players after a training session.
And then there is confirmation bias. A little devil of a thing that is ubiquitous in our lives and one that may even arise from our own best intentions. A little while ago I was listening to a coach who was making the case that players should keep two hands on the stick when defending in the circle.
If I remember right, the coach made a good case for the technique being more stable, allowing defenders to get lower, and ultimately creating fewer rash challenges so decreasing the likelihood of giving away a corner. All eminently sensible but I did sit there thinking it would be nice to also hear about the drawbacks of two-handed defence or the benefits of the alternative (mobility and reach, perhaps). After all, I think of the game as a broad church that demands one picks appropriate solutions for the situation from one’s varied tactical and technical toolbox. So I was left unconvinced. Not because it didn’t seem a good method to emphasise to players but that the argument was unbalanced6.
Fixation on a singular idea, however much it seems to make sense, however much we might be wedded to its seeming veracity, can arguably lead to a process where one only sees or acknowledges examples that confirm that singular idea even if there is evidence to the contrary. One might pass over instances of two-handed tackling errors or one-handed successes in preference for something we have convinced ourselves is true. Confirmation bias writ large.
Despite attending numerous hockey coaching courses and workshops I have rarely (if ever) heard coaches or coach educators talking about the topic. The focus of any psychological discussion invariably revolves around the players. Perhaps, if Ernst Baart can find a sports psychologist familiar with this topic it may make for a good MasterClass?
The paper is open access thankfully (not something the JSS does very often) so you don’t need to belong to a research group, you can get it here.
As a young adult I came to my senses (read couldn’t afford London tennis club fees) and turned to a much better sport - squash.
Though arguably, religious belief is a superstition too.
His original work was done a little while ago (1948!) but the paper is available and very readable. Chomsky put to bed a lot of the ideas of behaviouralism in his devastating critique but the example of Skinner and his pigeons persist.
Here is the men’s game summary and the proportion won and lost by the team starting first.
Particularly so from an analysis point of view because the whole thing is eminently testable. Decide on a criteria for success (winning a tackle, not giving away a corner/shot) and then compare defender’s making an action with one or two hands on the stick. Very simple, and easy to get to an answer.