title: A sinister bias for calling fouls in soccer.
abstract: Distinguishing between a fair and unfair tackle in soccer can be difficult. For referees, choosing to call a foul often requires a decision despite some level of ambiguity. We were interested in whether a well documented perceptual-motor bias associated with reading direction influenced foul judgments. Prior studies have shown that readers of left-to-right languages tend to think of prototypical events as unfolding concordantly, from left-to-right in space. It follows that events moving from right-to-left should be perceived as atypical and relatively debased. In an experiment using a go/no-go task and photographs taken from real games, participants made more foul calls for pictures depicting left-moving events compared to pictures depicting right-moving events. These data suggest that two referees watching the same play from distinct vantage points may be differentially predisposed to call a foul.
authors.affiliation: Neurology Department and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. akranjec@mail.med.upenn.edu
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kranjec
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lehet
authors.forename: Bianca
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bromberger
authors.forename: Anjan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chatterjee
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D015982:Bias; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012916:Soccer; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult