What your choice of best ever footballer says about human memory

Cruijff - the best ever player?

Ask a friend to name the best ever footballer and they're likely to pick someone who was mid-career when they (your friend) was aged around 17. That's according to a new investigation into the "reminiscence bump". This term describes the fact that when you ask people to name the most memorable events in their lives, they tend to refer to things that happened to them in their teens and early twenties. Recently it's been shown that a similar effect occurs when you ask people to name their favourite music, books and films, with them tending to pick out content from their youth. Now David Rubin and his colleagues have extended this line of research to people's judgement of the best footballers of all time.

Six hundred and nineteen people (aged 16 to 80) took part in the study online, conducted in Dutch and hosted on the website of the University of Amsterdam. Participants were presented with the names of 190 all-time leading football players and asked to name their judgement of the five best players of all time. They could either select from the list or choose their own.

The researchers calculated the mid-career point of the 172 players named by the participants and compared this against the participants' age at that time. Participants overwhelming tended to name players whose career mid-point coincided with participants' teens and early twenties. The modal age (i.e. the most common) of the participants at their chosen players' mid-career was 17 years. The researchers said this was the most appropriate statistic to use because the average (22 years) and median (20 years) stats are more susceptible to the bias to name currently active players.

Another way of reporting the results is to say that participants recalled more players who were mid-career in the second decade of the participants' lives than ones who were mid-career in the participants' third decade. And they named more players from the period in which they were aged 11 to 30 than from the period in which they were aged 1 to 10 or aged 31 to 40.

Focusing on the most frequently chosen players, Johan Cruijff was most often selected by participants who were aged 9 to 18 when he was at his career midpoint; Pelé was most often selected by participants who were aged between 12 and 21 years when he was mid-career. Incidentally, currently active players who made the list of twenty most frequently chosen players were: Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and David Beckham (go Becks!). Only the youngest cohort (born between 1986 to 1995) chose more players who were mid-career in 2000s than players who were mid-career in the 90s.

"The results of this study are another example of the robustness of the reminiscence bump phenomenon," the researchers said.

Several theories have been put forward to explain the reminiscence bump, including that our memories are more efficient in our teens and twenties. Others think it's because more novel things happen to us at that time of life, such as our first kiss or first job, causing them to get lodged in memory. Rubin and his team say their findings are inconsistent with this "cognitive account", as it's known, because children typically start to play and follow football between the ages of 5 and 15, so if the cognitive account were true you'd think they'd pick players who were mid-career at that time.
_________________________________

Janssen, S., Rubin, D., and Conway, M. (2011). The reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of the best football players of all time: Pelé, Cruijff or Maradona? The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2011.606372

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The taste for competition peaks at age 50

No wonder parents' races at school sports days are such fraught affairs. A new study finds that far from us mellowing as we age, our inclination for competition increases through life, peaking around the age of 50.

Prior to their data collection, Ulrich Mayr and his colleagues had several reasons for expecting that preference to compete would peak in youth and fade thereafter. They cited reductions in testosterone with age; the documented shift with age to a more prosocial orientation (older people give more money to charity); an age-related shift to a mastery (rather than comparison) approach to skills; and age-related falls in confidence, perhaps based on actual cognitive declines with age.

The researchers set up a stall at a shopping mall and invited volunteers to solve mental arithmetic equations (e.g. "true or false: 7 + 2 + 3 - 6 = 5") as quickly as possible in return for points. Points were exchanged for modest cash prizes. The 543 participants (aged 25 to 75), in private booths, completed one round lasting 30-seconds in which they earned more points the more equations they solved. They then completed a second "competitive" round, in which they only earned points for solving more equations than a randomly chosen rival. Participants didn't get feedback on their performance until the experiment was over. Finally - and this was the crucial round - the participants could choose for the final round whether to play solo (known as "piece-rate"), like they had in the first round, or whether to compete once again against another randomly chosen participant. Afterwards participants estimated how well they thought they'd done, as a measure of their confidence.

There were some clear gender effects, consistent with past research. Women were far less likely than men to opt for the competitive version in the final round (correction: 36 per cent vs. 56 per cent). And there were clear age effects across both genders: the taste for competition against others increased with age, levelling off at about the age of 50. For example, nearly 70 per cent of men aged 45 to 54 opted to compete versus just over 50 per cent of men aged 25 to 34.

What lies behind the gender effects? Men and women performed equally well at the task under piece-rate conditions, but the women's performance did drop slightly in the competitive version. Women were also less confident than men. Women's confidence, unlike men's, was also related to their choice of whether to compete or not (men chose to compete without consideration of their likelihood of winning!). However, none of these factors was sizeable enough to explain the size of the gender difference in choice to compete.

What about the effects of age on preference for competition? There was no difference in actual performance with age. Changes in confidence also couldn't explain the age-related change. A potential explanation comes from a recent meta-analysis, which found that the trait of "social dominance" increases with age until the 50s. Said Mayr and his team: "Successfully engaging in competitions is critical for establishing social dominance and therefore it is plausible to assume that with such an increased interest in social dominance comes an increased 'taste for competition."

One important caveat needs to be mentioned. Because this was a cross-sectional study, it's possible that it's not age that's related to competitiveness but rather the era that the participants grew up in - or something else to do with their particular generation. To get around this problem, participants would need to be followed up throughout their lives, to see if their taste for competition changes as they age. However, the researchers can't see any reason why the fifty-somethings' upbringing should have led them to be more competitive than the 30-somethings. Yes, Baby Boomers are known for their competitiveness but 30-year-olds grew up in a prolonged economic downturn that might have increased their competitive tendencies.

What about you - have you found that your taste for competition has altered as you've aged? Or looking at your friends and family, do these results fit with your own experiences of their competitiveness? Please use comments to let us know.
_________________________________

Mayr, U., Wozniak, D., Davidson, C., Kuhns, D., and Harbaugh, W. (2011). Competitiveness across the life span: The feisty fifties. Psychology and Aging DOI: 10.1037/a0025655

NB. Percentages for men and women's preferences were quoted incorrectly before but have now been corrected.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How losing can increase your chances of winning

When is losing the route to winning? When you're losing by just a little. That's according to Jonah Berger and Devin Pope who think the paradoxical effect works because losing by a whisker is highly motivating.

Berger and Pope began by studying over 18,000 NBA basketball games. Specifically they compared half-time scores with final results. Much of the data was as you'd expect - the further in the lead a team was at half time, the more likely they were to win the game, and vice versa for teams losing at half time. In fact, there was a reliable pattern - for every two points a team was in the lead at half time, they were six to eight per cent more likely to win out at the end.

But there was also a clear blip in the data. Teams that were behind by one point at half time were actually more likely to end up winning than teams that were ahead by one point. Compared against the larger trend, teams behind by one point were approximately six per cent more likely to win than you'd expect - an effect about half the size of the benefit of playing at home. The researchers don't think it has to do with coaches changing strategy or giving inspiring half-time talks: the 'losing leading to winning' effect was no greater among teams with more successful coaches. Rather, Berger and Pope think the effect is purely to do with the motivating influence of being just a bit behind.

The pair tested this idea with a simple lab task. Participants tapped two keyboard keys alternately as fast as they could for thirty seconds in a race against a partner. Then there was a pause in which they were given false performance feedback: told they were far behind their partner, just behind, tied, just ahead, or given no feedback. The 30-second key-tapping was then repeated. The result was striking. Those participants told they were just behind increased their effort in the second phase far more than all the other participants.

A final study was identical except that the researchers also measured the participants' self-efficacy - that is, their belief in their ability to succeed. The just-behind benefit was replicated and for these participants only, self-efficacy made a big difference. That is, participants told they were just-behind at half-time and who had high self-efficacy were the ones who most increased their effort in the second phase. Losing by a whisker is highly motivating it seems, especially for those who believe they can do something about it.

Berger and Pope think their findings have real-life implications, in business as well as in sport. 'Managers trying to encourage employees to work harder, for example, might provide feedback about how a person is doing relative to a slightly better performer,' they said. 'Strategically scheduling breaks when someone is behind should also help focus people on the deficit and subsequently increase effort. This should lead to stronger performance and ultimately success.'
_________________________________

Berger, J., and Pope, D. (2011). Can Losing Lead to Winning? Management Science DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1110.1328 PDF via author website. [HT: Ian Leslie]. 

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Athletes are more skilled at crossing the road than non-athletes

They impress on the sports field with their rapid reactions and fancy footwork, but do athletes' abilities translate to the real world? Past research on this topic, nearly all of it lab-based, has demonstrated superior performance by athletes on sport-specific and basic psychological tests, such as of attention and processing speed. Now Laura Chaddock and her colleagues have shown that the athletic advantage translates to an everyday task - crossing a busy road, albeit that this was tested using an immersive virtual reality treadmill.

Eighteen male and female athletes (including football players, swimmers and tennis players; all Division 1 performers at university) and 18 non-athletic, healthy controls, all donned virtual reality goggles and walked on a treadmill to cross a simulated eight-metre wide, two-lane road - a multi-faceted task requiring skilled attentional processing and coordination. The two participant groups were matched for academic ability, age, height, weight and video-game experience.

The cars on the road travelled with a simulated speed of 40 to 55 miles an hour. There was no safe zone to stop in the middle and no opportunity to walk backwards or sideways, so once participants had made a decision to cross, they had to go through with it. Their challenge was to get to the other side within thirty seconds, without being hit. To spice things up, two distraction conditions required the participants to conduct a conversation on a hands-free kit or listen to their favoured music on an ipod as they crossed the road. The participants also had their reaction times tested in a basic computer task.

The take-home finding is that overall the athletes out-performed the non-athletes: they crossed successfully on 72 per cent of trials compared with the non-athletes' success rate of 55 per cent. However, this superiority didn't apply when only the distraction conditions were considered - the researchers think this is because the distraction of a complex conversation isn't a part of most sports. The athletes were also faster at the simple reaction time task and statistical analysis suggested this factor accounted for their superiority at road crossing.

'Our results suggest that cognitive skills trained in sport may engender transfer to performance on everyday challenges,' the researchers said. 'To provide a sport-specific example, it is plausible that an elite soccer player not only shows an ability to multitask and process incoming information quickly on a fast-paced soccer field ... he or she also shows these skills in the context of real world tasks.' However, Chaddock's team conceded that their cross-sectional design means they have yet to demonstrate that playing a sport causes these advantages - it could plausibly be that people with these skills are more likely to take up a sport.
_________________________________

Chaddock, L., Neider, M., Voss, M., Gaspar, J., and Kramer, A. (2011). Do Athletes Excel At Everyday Tasks? Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0b013e318218ca74

Don't touch! On the mixed effects of avoidant instructions

What happens if you tell a golfer not to over-shoot a putt? Does it make them more likely to overshoot (an ironic effect, like the way suppressing thoughts of white bears actually leads to bear-based thoughts) or does it provoke over-compensation - putts that are particularly short? The same question could be asked for similar situations in other sports and also for movement instructions in the psychology lab.

Past research has produced mixed results - sometimes ironic effects are observed, other times over-compensation. To find out what's going on, Christopher Russell and colleagues conducted a lab experiment in which 40 undergrads repeatedly traced an imaginary straight line between two on-screen dots with a computer mouse. On key trials, they were given an additional instruction not to move to the left (or right, etc) of the line.

The effect of this additional instruction was far from uniform across the participants. The largest sub-grouping over-compensated. So if the additional command was 'do not move to the left', these 26 participants actually traced a movement that was further to the right of the straight line than when no such additional instruction was given. However, there was another group of participants who demonstrated ironic effects - the instruction to avoid going left made them more likely to do just that. Although the ten participants in the latter group scored higher on trait and state anxiety, their errors were actually smaller than the over-compensators.

What about the effect of an extra distraction task? When participants had to trace straight lines while simultaneously holding in a mind a 7-digit number, the effect of an additional 'do not go left/right' instruction was reversed for about half the participants - if they'd shown ironic effects in the absence of the memory task, they now over-compensated, and vice versa. Curiously, for a minority of participants, the extra burden of the memory task actually had a beneficial effect - cancelling out their earlier ironic response to the additional task instruction, so that their mouse movements ended up straighter.

So, where does all this leave us? Although the theoretical implications are beyond the scope of this item, there are some take-home practical lessons. 'The avoidant instructions used here deliberately resembled those used by coaches to direct their athletes and by athletes in their self-talk,' Russell and his colleagues said, 'to show how ironic outcomes and over-compensations can be unwittingly inflicted in sporting contexts.'

Researchers should also take note that the avoidant instructions they give to their participants could have important, unpredictable effects that vary from one participant to another, and from one condition to another, depending on concurrent task demands. 'What experimenters often assume to be random error in their data may actually be explained by ironic and overcompensatory responding styles,' Russell's team said. 'In any event, experimenters may minimise their biasing influence by emphasising to participants what is to be achieved while neglecting to specify what should be avoided.'
_________________________________

Russell, C., and Grealy, M. (2010). Avoidant instructions induce ironic and overcompensatory movement errors differently between and within individuals. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63 (9), 1671-1682 DOI: 10.1080/17470210903572022

Football fouls more likely to be given when play heads left

A simple perceptual bias could influence football referees' judgements about whether a foul occurred or not. That's according to Alexander Kranjec and colleagues, who had 12 football players at the University of Pennsylvania look for half a second each at 268 static images of one player tackling another and decide whether a foul had been committed. Unbeknown to the participants, 134 of the pictures were simply mirror opposites of the other 134.

The key finding was that more fouls (66.5 vs. 63.3 - a statistically significant difference) were judged to have occurred when assessing the images in which movement was captured in a leftward direction than when assessing the same images mirror-reversed and therefore featuring implied rightward motion. The researchers think this anomaly may have to do with our bias (at least in cultures that read from left to right) for rightward motion. Motion from right to left is perceived as less natural and this may be responsible for influencing judgements about fouls during play in that direction. Apparently film directors exploit this same bias by having villains arrive on-screen from the right.

Kranjec's team said their finding has implications for refereeing. The most popular system, known as the 'left diagonal refereeing system' (see picture), in which the referee runs a diagonal axis between the two left-hand corners of the pitch, results in the referee witnessing tackles in both goal areas primarily from a right-to-left perspective, thus making judgments of fouls in these areas more likely - an advantage to attackers. This is okay because it applies to both teams. What's important, Kranjec and colleagues warn, is that the referee doesn't switch to a 'right diagonal system' half-way through a match, potentially penalising a losing side that needs to attack yet no longer enjoys the benefits of this perceptual bias when playing in offensive areas.

'These results ... suggest that the effects of a low-level perceptual mechanisms could alter a decision, change the result of a game and perhaps, the fortunes of nations,' the researchers said.
_________________________________

Kranjec A, Lehet M, Bromberger B, & Chatterjee A (2010). A sinister bias for calling fouls in soccer. PloS one, 5 (7) PMID: 20628648

Does greater competition improve performance or increase cheating?

What happens when you recruit dozens of students to perform a maze-based computer task and then you ratchet up the competitive pressure? Does their performance improve or do they just cheat more?

Christiane Schwieren and Doris Weichselbaumer found out by having 33 men and 32 women at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona spend 30 minutes completing on-screen mazes. Crucially, half the students were paid according to how many mazes they completed whereas the half in the 'highly competitive' condition were only paid per maze if they were the top performer in their group of six students.

The students in the highly competitive condition narrowed their eyes, rolled up their sleeves, focused their minds and cheated. That's right, the students playing under the more competitive prize rules didn't complete any more mazes than students in the control group, they just cheated more.

To be more specific, the female students in the highly competitive condition cheated more. That is, although across both conditions there was no overall difference between men and women in the amount they cheated, only women responded to the competition intensity by cheating more. Schwieren and Weichselbaumer dug deeper into their results and actually this wasn't a gender issue. Competition increased cheating specifically among poorer performers and it just happened that the poorer performers tended to be female.

How did the researchers measure cheating? After a brief practice, the students were told to continue completing mazes on level 2 difficulty, but they could choose to break the rules by switching to an easier level. The game also gave the option of clicking a button to be guided through the maze solutions. Finally, the students could lie at the end on a score sheet about how many mazes they'd completed. Earlier the researchers had loaded a spy programme on the computers. This took a screen shot on each mouse click, thus revealing the students' true actions.

'It turns out that individuals who are less able to fulfill the assigned task do not only have a higher probability to cheat, they also cheat in more different ways,' the researchers said. 'It appears that poor performers either feel entitled to cheat in a system that does not give them any legitimate opportunities to succeed, or they engage in "face saving" activity to avoid embarrassment for their poor performance."
_________________________________

Schwieren, C., & Weichselbaumer, D. (2010). Does competition enhance performance or cheating? A laboratory experiment Journal of Economic Psychology, 31 (3), 241-253 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2009.02.005

Hosting a major sporting event - economic gains are unlikely, but will it bring happiness?

The football World Cup in South Africa is almost upon us and the clock is ticking down on London 2012. It's a timely moment to ask: why, when it costs a country billions of pounds to host a major international sporting event, do they bother?

The usual argument is that it's all about the legacy - the lasting economic benefit. But according to two economists, Georgios Kavetsos and Stefan Szymanski, the evidence for this simply isn't there. For example, there's research showing that the economic benefit of sports-related investment is lower than for other types of investment. And the newly-created employment opportunities associated with sport are most often low-skilled and casual. Now Kavetsos and Syzmanski have tested an alternative explanation for the political appeal of big sports events: perhaps they make the population happier.

Increasingly, governments are also choosing to invest huge quantities of public money in training athletes so as to boost their country's chances of sporting success. The usual justification is that sports success is good for a country's well being and national pride. Kavestsos and Syzmanski also tested this claim.

The researchers mined the Eurobarometer Survey series, involving 12 European nations, including the UK, between the years 1974 to 2004. Twice a year, a random selection of 1000 people per country were interviewed and one of the questions was about their life satisfaction. Kavestsos and Syzmanski looked for any changes in average life satisfaction scores in surveys that took place in the Autumn following the Olympics, Football World Cup or European Cup. Specifically, they wanted to know if a country doing better than expected in a competition had any beneficial effect on average life satisfaction and/or whether hosting a competition had any benefits (the data available meant the latter question was restricted to the hosting of football events).

There was very little evidence that performing better than expected at a sports event had any positive benefit for the average life satisfaction scores of a country's citizens. The data moved in the right direction but with one exception the effects were not statistically significant. By contrast, there was strong evidence that hosting a major international football event boosted the life satisfaction of a host nation's citizens. Good news for South Africa.

Just how large was the life satisfaction increase for a typical citizen in a host nation? Kavetsos and Syzmanski said it was pretty big: three times the size of the happiness boost associated with gaining a higher education; one and half times the happiness boost associated with getting married; and nearly large enough to offset the misery triggered by divorce.

Is there a catch? Unfortunately, yes. By one year after the event, the benefits had gone, so the effects on people's happiness were extremely short-lived (the effects of marriage on happiness, by contrast, are long-lasting). There was also no evidence of a host country's happiness being boosted in anticipation of hosting an event.

'Most politicians calculate that hosting events can only enhance their political standing,' Kavetsos and Syzmanski said. 'This makes sense if the benefits of hosting are not derived through economic gains [which the research says don't exist], but through the feelgood factor, specifically associated with being the host.'
_________________________________

Kavetsos, G., & Szymanski, S. (2010). National well-being and international sports events. Journal of Economic Psychology, 31 (2), 158-171 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2009.11.005

Video-game exercise bikes - not just a gimmick

Exercise is going techno. People are playing Wii fit sports games in their homes and gyms are full of ever more interactive exercise machines. But is this trend anything more than gimmickry? Yes, according to a new study by Ryan Rhodes at the Behavioural Medicine Lab at the University of Victoria, and his colleagues.

Rhodes' team had 29 previously inactive young men embark on an exercise regime, involving three half-hour cycling sessions a week for six weeks. Crucially, half the men trained on GameBikes wired up to a Playstation, such that their peddling speed and steering interacted with in-game events. The remaining participants trained on standard low-tech exercise bikes, although they were allowed to enjoy their own choice of music over an ipod. Exercise intensity was equalised across the two groups.

The bottom-line: the men who trained on the GameBikes were more likely to stick to the exercise regime. They attended an average of 77 per cent of the sessions compared with 42 per cent of participants in the low-tech control condition.

Rhodes' team also took some psychological measures in line with the well-established theory of planned of behaviour. Only 'affective attitudes' were found to differ between the two exercise groups. That is, men in the GameBike condition expected the exercise regime to be more enjoyable, pleasant and exciting than control participants, partly explaining their greater adherence. Attitudes in both groups had declined by the end of the six-week period, but they remained more positive in the GameBike group than the controls.

The researchers said more research was needed with other participant groups (the men in the current study all had personal experience of video games), over a longer duration, and with different control conditions - for example, how does video-game based exercise compare with low tech outdoors exercise?

'In summary, exercise videogaming appears to have potential efficacy as a physical activity intervention,' the researchers concluded.
_________________________________

Rhodes, R., Warburton, D., & Bredin, S. (2009). Predicting the effect of interactive video bikes on exercise adherence: An efficacy trial Psychology, Health & Medicine, 14 (6), 631-640 DOI: 10.1080/13548500903281088