Judgment, Decision-making and Success in Sport

Michael Bar-Eli is the Nat Holman Chair in Sports Research at the Guilford Glazer School of Business and Management and Head of the Management Studies program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He is also Senior Vice President of the Asian-South Pacific Association of Sport Psychology. Henning Plessner is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Leipzig. His main research areas are Judgment and Decision-Making in sports and the psychology of intuition. Markus Raab is Department Head of Performance Psychology at the German Sport University Cologne. He is Editor of the German Journal of Sport Psychology, Section Editor of the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, and Editorial Board Member of Psychology of Sport and Exercise.

Preface vii

Judgement and Decision Making as a Topic of Sport Science 1

Maximization and optimization in sport 3

JDM history 4

The development of JDM research in sport 6

Rationale and structure of this book 10

Theories of (Social) Judgement 13

Psychophysics 16

Social judgement theory 18

Social cognition 19

Summary 25

Theories of Decision Making 27

Subjective expected utility theory 31

Prospect theory 32

Decisional field theory 33

Simple heuristic approach 35

Summary 37

Expertise in JDM 39

What are the components of expertise in JDM? 42

How can we measure JDM expertise? 43

How can we explain JDM expertise? 46

How can we develop JDM expertise? 47

Summary 48

Athletes 51

Judging one’s own performance 53

What choices are athletes confronted with? 59

How do athletes choose? 66

JDM training for athletes 78

Summary 89

Managers and Coaches 91

JDM as a leadership task 93

Managerial JDM 95

Coaches’ JDM 108

Summary 121

Referees 123

The tasks of referees 126

Perceptual limitations 127

Prior knowledge 132

Rules of information integration 136

Improving referees’ JDM 139

Summary 143

Observers 145

Biases in judgements of sport performance 148

Predictions and betting 154

Summary 160

References 163

Author Index 189

Subject Index 201