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Psychology of Sport and Exercise 7 (2006) 555575

www.elsevier.com/locate/psychsport

Sports performance judgments from a social cognitive

perspective
Henning Plessner, Thomas Haar
Psychological Institute, University of Heidelberg, Hauptstrasse 47-51, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Received 2 August 2005; received in revised form 22 March 2006; accepted 24 March 2006
Available online 8 June 2006

Abstract
Objective: Judging ones own or others performance is a central task for most people involved in
competitive sportseither as athletes, coaches, referees, or spectators. Social cognition is the general study
of how people make sense of other people and themselves on the basis of an information processing
framework. This paper presents a social-cognitive overview of empirical work on judging sport
performance. It follows the basic steps of social information processing (i.e., perception, encoding/
categorization, memory processes, and information integration).
Conclusions: Ample anecdotal and empirical evidence indicates that sports performance judgments are at
least as prone to systematic errors (biases) as other social judgments. Thus, achieving accurate performance
evaluations can help to improve the quality of decision making on various levels of sport behavior (e.g.,
referee decisions, strategy choice, team selection). The application of a social cognition approach provides
insights into the processes that underlie biases in judgments of sport performance and, thus, some hints on
how to prevent them. In addition, we propose possible future applications of social cognition concepts in
sports judgment research.
r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Social cognition and sports; Sports performance judgments; Biases; Information processing

Corresponding author. Tel.: +6221 547700; fax: +6221 547745.

E-mail address: henning.plessner@psychologie.uni-heidelberg.de (H. Plessner).

1469-0292/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2006.03.007

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Introduction
Judgments of performance are prevalent in competitive sports. For example, the outcome of a
sport competition can be assessed by either an objective measurement (e.g., time in swimming), an
objective score (e.g., goals in soccer), or a subjective judgment (e.g., points in gure skating).
According to Stefani (1998), almost a third of all sports that are recognized by the International
Olympic Committee (IOC) are considered to have a performance rating system in which judging
plays a major role. But even when sport performance is assessed in an objective way, there is
often a judgment of athletes performances beyond the objective values. For example, in an
ambiguous tackling situation, a football referee has to decide whether to award a penalty.
Similarly, a tennis player may judge her opponents performance during a game in order to choose
an appropriate strategy, basketball coaches assess the abilities of athletes in order to select the best
players for a team, and experts at betting agencies evaluate football teams in order to make
promising stakes.
Taken together, it is clear that performance judgments are an inherent part of competitive sport
behavior. Moreover, people involved in sport typically aim to make accurate judgments, and thus
avoid the negative outcomes of mistakes. For example, a wrongly awarded penalty can provoke
unfriendly responses by players and yield a football referees dismissal; the underestimation of a
tennis players form can lead to the choice of an unsuccessful strategy; the wrong assessment of a
basketball players abilities can result in a substandard team; and the overestimation of a teams
strength while making stakes can directly cause the loss of money. Therefore, it is important to
study how the accuracy of performance judgments in sports can be enhanced.
It is a well-known fact that judgments of sport performances areat least sometimesbiased.
For example, in a classic study on group perception, Hastorf and Cantril (1954) studied
evaluations of an exceptionally rough American football game between two university teams. A
week after the game, students from each of the universities were asked for their reactions toward
the game. Among others, they were asked to judge how clean and fair as opposed to dirty and
rough the game was. The majority of the students from the university that won the game tended to
evaluate the game as fair (and rough), while the students from the university that lost found the
game rather dirty and rough. In their explanation of this effect, Hastorf and Cantril (1954)
focused on the constructive nature of social judgments, wherein judgments of peoples behaviors
are shaped by observers prior knowledge and values. In principle, this view is shared by the
modern social cognition approach (Bless, Fiedler, & Strack, 2004; Fiske & Taylor, 1991) that
provides the theoretical framework for our view on judgments of sports performance.
Judgments of sports performance are typically concerned with one of three judgmental
dimensions: (a) in evaluative judgments, performance is judged on a goodbad scale (e.g., Roger
Federer is the best tennis player ever); (b) in judgments of identification, people judge whether the
when condition of a certain rule is present (e.g., recognizing a foul play as a prerequisite of
awarding a free-kick); (c) in judgments of cause (causal attributions), people make judgments
about the contribution of potential factors that led to certain outcomes (e.g., Federer won the
match because his play is more sophisticated than his opponents). For pragmatic reasons, this
article is conned to research on evaluative judgments and judgments of identication. Recent
overviews concerning causal attributions in sports have been provided elsewhere, for example, by
Biddle, Hanrahan, and Sellars (2001) and Rees, Ingledew, and Hardy (2005).

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The majority of studies about evaluative judgments and judgments of identication in sports
that are available so far are concerned with decisions by sport ofcials (e.g., referees, umpires,
judges, linesmen). The reason for this is that their decisions are (or should be) mainly determined
by their judgments, and many are more or less observable. This does not hold for other groups
involved in sports. For example, athletes are most likely to take the consequences of their
decisions into account when making decisions. Accordingly, decisions by athletes have been
studied on the basis of a general decision-making approach (e.g., Tenenbaum & Bar-Eli, 1993)
rather than on a social cognition approach.

The social cognition perspective

Social cognition research is concerned with the social knowledge and the cognitive processes
that are involved when individuals construct their subjective reality; it is the study of how people
make sense of other people and themselves (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Social cognition follows an
information processing framework and, thus, investigates how social information is perceived,
encoded, transferred to and recalled from memory, and what processes are involved when people
make judgments, attributions, and decisions (Bless et al., 2004). In an effort to understand social
information processing, social cognition researchers have identied quite a number of systematic
errors (biases) in social judgments. For example, Funder (2003) counted 39 different biases that
are reported in the social cognition literature (e.g., conrmation bias, halo effect, fundamental
attribution error). Given the assumption that judging sport performances follows the general
principles of social judgments (e.g., Gilovich, 1984a; Plessner, 2005), one can expect these biases
to occur in the sport domain as well. The study of biases and their underlying processes can, thus,
help to develop ideas about how accuracy in judgments of sport performances can be improved.
Bless et al. (2004) introduced a sequence of information processing as a framework for the
analysis of social judgments (see Fig. 1). It differentiates between several subtasks or steps of
information processing that link an observable input (e.g., a tackle in football) to a persons overt
behavior (e.g., a referee sending a player off the eld). At rst, a stimulus has to be perceived (e.g.,
the referee needs to attend to the tackle situation). Next, the perceived stimulus is encoded and
given meaning (e.g., it is categorized as a forbidden attack on the opponent). This second step
relies heavily on prior knowledge (e.g., the referee must retrieve the decision criteria for forbidden
tackles from memory). In addition, the encoded episode will be stored (automatically) in memory
and may inuence future judgments, just as retrieved episodic memories inuence current
processing (e.g., the referee remembers that the attacking player has been warned before). In a
nal step, the perceived and encoded information is put together with the retrieved memories and
other information that is available or inferred, and is integrated into a judgment that is expressed
as a decision (e.g., awarding a free-kick and sending the attacking player off). When this
framework is applied to the judgment of sport performance, it becomes obvious that an erroneous
decision can stem from smaller errors or incorrect information from different steps of information
processing (Plessner, 2005; Plessner & Raab, 1999). For example, a referees erroneous decision to
send off a player can be caused by his misperception that the player hit his opponents leg instead
of the ball, or by the false memory that the player has persistently infringed the rules of the game
before this situation.

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memory, organized knowledge

(the laws of the game, prior episodes with the attacking player)

perception

categorization

information integration

(attending to the tackle)

(as a foul)

(assessing the severity)

stimulus events

behavioral response

(a players tackle)

(free kick and red card)

Fig. 1. The sequence of social information processing (Bless et al., 2004) applied to the example of a football referees
decision task.

The different sources of error in the information processing steps of sport performance
judgment was illustrated, for example, by Plessner (1999). In this study, expectancy effects in
gymnastic judging were attributed to either categorization processes or information integration
processes, depending on the social judgment situation. This was possible by using gymnastic
judges written protocols as an online measurement of cognitive processes that allows for the
differentiation between these steps.
In this paper, we present an overview of empirical work that investigates biases in judgments of
sport performances from a social cognitive perspective. Our overview is structured according to
the steps of (1) perception, (2) categorization, (3) memory processes, and (4) information
integration. Most authors do not explicitly relate their work to these steps, therefore we have
categorized these studies according to what we considered the main focus of investigation (see
Table 1). Additionally, we differentiate between work that is concerned with local or with global
judgments. Local judgments are judgments about performances that are limited in time and space
(e.g., Roger Federer played this ball brilliantly). Global judgments, on the other hand, are
concerned with performances in a more extended period of time (e.g., Roger Federer is the best
tennis player of the last four years). Whereas local judgments in sports are typically concerned
with episodes during a competition or with the performance within one competition or
competitive unit, global judgments typically go beyond the observation of a performance in one
competition. Furthermore, global judgments tend to be more dispositional (e.g., referring to traits
or abilities) than local judgments (e.g., referring to features of the situation).1 Local and global
judgments should be understood as categories with a rather fuzzy boundary between them rather
than dichotomous. However, as will be evident from our overview, this distinction inuences the
different aspects of social information processing that have been addressed in the literature on
judgments of sport performance.
1

For a similar distinction see, for example, Warr and Knapper (1968).

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Table 1
Empirical work on biases in judgments of sport performance by steps of information processing (main focus)
Local judgments

Global judgments

Perception

Distorted visual input (Baldo et al., 2002; Ford

et al., 1995; Ford et al., 1997; Helsen et al.,
2006; Oudejans et al., 2000, 2005; Plessner &
Schallies, 2005)

Sampling bias (Fizel & Ditri, 1996;

Plessner et al., 2001)

Categorization

Influence of uniforms color (Frank & Gilovich,

1988; Tiryaki, 2005)

Influence of stereotypes (Eccles et al.,

2000; Freeman, 1988; Jacobs & Eccles,
1992)
Influence of body language and clothing
(Greenlees, Greenlees, Buscombe et al.,
2005; Greenless, Bradley et al., 2005)

Order effect (Ansorge et al., 1978; Plessner,

1999; Scheer, 1973; Scheer & Ansorge, 1975,
1979; Wilson, 1977)
Reputation bias (Findlay & Ste-Marie, 2004;
Jones et al., 2002; Rainey et al., 1989)
Influence of stereotypes (Coulomb-Cabagno et
al., 2005; Souchon et al., 2004; Stone et al.,
1997)
Memory processes

Information
integration

Prior processing effect (Ste-Marie, 2003; SteMarie & Lee, 1991: Ste-Marie & Valiquette,
1996; Ste-Marie et al., 2001)
Constructive memory illusions (Walther et al.,
2002)

Sampling bias (Unkelbach et al., 2006)

Hot hand phenomenon (Burns, 2004; Gilovich

et al., 1985)
Home bias (Balmer et al., 2005; Nevill et al.,
2002; Sutter & Kocher, 2004)
Sequential effect (Brand et al., 2006; Damisch
et al., 2006; Plessner & Betsch, 2001)
Ingroup favoritism and international bias
(Ansorge & Scheer, 1988; de Fiore & Kramer,
1982; Hastorf & Cantril, 1954; Lehman &
Reifman, 1987; Mohr & Larsen, 1998; SteMarie, 1996; Seltzer & Glass, 1991; Snibbe et
al., 2003; Sumner & Mobley, 1981; Whissel et
al. 1993)
Norms and conformity (Rainey & Larsen,
1988; Rainey et al., 1993; Scheer et al., 1983;
Vanden Auweele et al., 2004; Wanderer, 1987)

Sophomore slump (Gilovich, 1984b;

Taylor & Cuave, 1994)
Thinking too much (Halberstadt &
Levine, 1999)

Availability heuristic (Young & French,

1998)

Perception
Local judgments
If a judgment of performance is intended to mirror the true performance of an athlete,
performance must rst be perceived accurately, so that the relevant information can be fed

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into the processing system. Therefore, it is important to take a look at the information a judge
attends to before he or she evaluates a performance or makes decisions about rule
applications. Ideally, all stimuli that are relevant for judging a performance are processed.
However, because the human capacity to process information is limited, a judge needs to select
which stimuli should undergo further processing. At best, judges know how to allocate their
attention. For instance, expert judges in gymnastics have been shown to differ from novices in
their visual search strategies (Bard, Fleury, Carrie`re, & Halle, 1980). By and large, this research
shows that expert judges in sports develop effective anticipatory strategies that help to improve
their decision making (e.g., MacMahon & Ste-Marie, 2002; Paull & Glencross, 1997; Ste-Marie,
1999, 2000).
The inuence of perceptual processes on judgment and decision making in sports is also evident
in a number of studies concerning the visual perspective from which the athletes behavior is
observed. For example, Schmidt and Bloch (1980) found in a case study that many differences in
the evaluation of critical basketball situations between referees, coaches, and observers are due to
their different viewing positions. It is therefore important to understand if expert judges in sports
are aware of the potential biasing inuence of their viewing position and are able to control for it.
The results of a number of studies on this issue provide a rather pessimistic answer. For example,
Oudejans et al. (2000) found that the high percentage of assistant referees errors in offside
decisions in football mainly reects their viewing position. Although they should stand in line with
the last defender, on average they are positioned too far behind. By considering the retinal images
of referees, Oudejans et al. (2000) predicted a specic relation of frequencies in different types of
errors (wrongly indicating offside vs. not indicating an actual offside) depending on the area of
attack (near vs. far from the assistant referee and inside or outside the defender). In an analysis of
several videotaped matches, this prediction was conrmed, thus demonstrating that assistant
referees decisions directly reect the situations as they are projected on their retinas (see also
Baldo, Ranvaud, & Morya, 2002; Helsen, Gilis, & Weston, 2006; Oudejans et al., 2005). In a
similar vein, Plessner and Schallies (2005) found gymnastic judges evaluations of the cross on
ringsa static strength elementto be inuenced by their viewing position (see also Ford,
Goodwin, & Richardson, 1995, on ball-strike judgments in baseball). In order to prevent biases
that stem from imperfect viewing positions, one can, for example, calculate positions that fulll
most of the perceptual demands of a judgment task and x these positions (e.g., Ford, Gallagher,
Lacy, Bridwell, & Goodwin, 1997). Another possibility is to provide judges with proper feedback
training, which has been found to help overcoming perceptual limitations, for example, in the
domain of in/out decisions in tennis (Jendrusch, 2002) and leg-before-wicket judgments in cricket
(Craven, 1998).
Global judgments
When social cognition researchers study perception they do not necessarily investigate the
actual process of perceiving (e.g., the working of the visual system). More often, they refer to the
more general inuence of the stimulus input on social judgments. According to the cognitiveecological sampling approach to social judgments (Fiedler, 2000), the quality of the stimulus input
can sufciently explain many judgment biases that are typically attributed to later stages of social
information processing, such as illusory correlations and conrmation biases. The sampling

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approach assumes that most judgments are based on samples of information that are, for
example, collected from the environment. These samples are virtually never random (Fiedler,
2000, p. 660) and may, therefore, be biased in many different ways. It has been found for several
judgment tasks, that people lack the awareness (and the ability) to correct biased samples, and
they, therefore tend to base their judgments directly on the sampled information as if it was drawn
randomly (e.g., Fiedler, Walther, Freytag, & Plessner, 2002).
While the viewing position obviously limits the representativeness of an information sample,
people are even less aware of many other sources that can lead to biased stimulus input. For
example, Plessner, Hartmann, Hohmann, and Zimmermann (2001) investigated the well-studied
phenomenon of base-rate neglect2 in the judgment of a football players quality. Their approach
explained this nding as a sampling error in inductive judgments, resulting from the confusion of
predictor and criterion sampling in probability judgments (Fiedler, Brinkmann, Betsch, & Wild,
2000). For example, when given the task to judge the conditional probability of being assigned to
a doping test after the use of doping measures, it makes a tremendous difference if a sample is
drawn depending on the predictor (using doping) or the criterion (assignment to a test). The latter
sampling process would lead to an overestimation of the conditional probability (and the
deterrence effect of doping tests), because the still rather rare criterion event test is
overrepresented and the large number of people who use doping measures but are not assigned
to a test are not considered. Plessner et al. (2001) applied this logic to the judgment of a football
teams probability of winning a game, given a certain player participated in a game. The
environment they provided was such that the team hardly ever won a game. When participants
coaches from various team sportssampled information from a record of one hundred games by
the criterion, the teams success, they overestimated the conditional probability and therefore the
quality of the player, just because they did not preserve the low environmental base rate of
victories in their sample; that is, most cases where the team lost and the player participated as well
were not considered. This bias did not show up when the coaches sampled by the predictor, the
players participation, which leads in this case to a representative sample of victories and losses
and therefore to a fair estimate of the conditional probability. However, when interviewed about
their judgment strategies none of the coaches reported an awareness of the potential sampling
trap.
In the world of sports, one can easily imagine several other factors that lead to biased
samples of performance information, for example, the selective attention of media to successful
players, or managers attention to absolute as opposed to relative success in the evaluation
of coaches efciency (e.g., Fizel & Ditri, 1996). The examples presented in this section
have demonstrated that biases in the stimulus input are likely to ow over to judgments
and decisions in sport. Therefore, a careful observation of the information that is perceived
by a judge can already explain a large number of existing biases in judgments of sport
performance.

Many studies on probabilistic reasoning (e.g., Bar-Hillel, 1980) demonstrate that information about base rates
receives less weight than it deserves if people would apply the Bayes theorem which is a rule for revising a prior
probability (the base rate) into a posterior probability after new data have been observed.

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Categorization
Local judgments
Once information about an athletes performance is perceived, a judge encodes and interprets
the information by giving it meaning. In order to encode and categorize new information, it must
be related to prior knowledge stored in memory. For example, a oor routine in gymnastics may
appear as a random sequence of strange movements to an inexperienced observer. A gymnastic
expert, on the other hand, will easily be able to recognize several categories of elements that differ
in difculty. While prior knowledge about judgment criteria in a sport and adequate
categorization systems are necessary requirements for accurate performance judgments
(MacMahon & Ste-Marie, 2002; Paull & Glencross, 1997; Ste-Marie, 1999, 2000), we focus our
overview on research about bad or inappropriate knowledgethat is, knowledge that has a
distorting or biasing inuence on judges cognitive processes and subsequent decisions (cf.
Plessner, 2005).
It is a widely shared assumption in social cognition that our social knowledge is organized in
complex structures, such as categories, schema, and scripts, and that these structures are
interconnected in a so-called associative network (Bless et al., 2004). Which knowledge is applied
when encoding a stimulus depends, for example, on its accessibility and applicability (Higgins,
1996). The accessibility of knowledge is affected by the recency and the frequency with which it, or
an associated structure has been used in the past; it can also be activated (primed) by
environmental cues. Based on this assumption, Frank and Gilovich (1988) were able to show that
even culturally shared knowledge that is seemingly irrelevant for a judgment of a performance can
have an inuence on sport decisions. They assumed that in most cultures there is a strong
association between the color black and aggression. The black uniform of a sports team could,
therefore, serve as a prime that automatically activates the concept of aggression, thus, increasing
its accessibility. In two studies and one experiment, evidence was found that players perceived
themselves as more aggressive and behaved accordingly when they were dressed in black as
opposed to other colors. In an additional experiment, Frank and Gilovich (1988) found that
American football referees were more likely to penalize a team wearing a black uniform than a
team wearing a white uniform. However, this effect seems not to be valid for all cultures. In a
study with Turkish football referees, Tiryaki (2005) found no comparable inuences of black
uniforms.
The encoding of information about sport performances has also been found to be inuenced
by categories that evolve directly from the competitive environment. For example, in
gymnastics the fact that gymnastics coaches typically place their gymnasts in rank order from
poorest at the beginning to best at the end in a team competition leads to different performance expectancies. These expectancies have been found to exert a biasing inuence on the
evaluation of exercises in gymnastics (Ansorge, Scheer, Laub, & Howard, 1978; Scheer, 1973;
Scheer & Ansorge, 1975, 1979) and synchronized swimming (Wilson, 1977). In an experiment
following this line of research, Plessner (1999) investigated the cognitive processes underlying
expectancy effects in gymnastics judging. Among others, he found the categorization of perceived
value parts (i.e., the attributed difculty to single gymnastic elements) to be biased by judges
expectancies.

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Other sources of expectancies that have been found to inuence local judgments of sport
performance are the reputation of an athlete or a team (Findlay & Ste-Marie, 2004; Jones, Paull,
& Erskine, 2002; Lehman & Reifman, 1987; Rainey, Larsen, & Stephenson, 1989) and stereotypes
about gender (Coulomb-Cabagno, Rascle, & Souchon, 2005; Souchon, Coulomb-Cabagno,
Traclet, & Rascle, 2004) and race (Stone, Perry, & Darley, 1997). Although these inuences have
been treated in the literature as unwelcome so far, it should be remembered, however, that
expectancies which mirror true differences can also improve accuracy in complex judgment tasks
(Jussim, 1991).
Taken together, the encoding and categorization of a perceived performance has been found to
be systematically inuenced by the activation of various types of prior knowledge, even when this
knowledge has no performance-relevant value in judging an athletes performance. It is clear that
these inuences increase in likelihood as judging situations increase in ambiguity. However, such
situations seem to occur quite often in sport competitions. For example, Nevill, Balmer, and
Williams (2002) asked referees to make assessments for 47 typical incidents taken from an English
Premier League match. One of the ndings was that none of these challenges resulted in a
unanimous decision by all qualied referees participating in the study (see also Teipel, Gerisch, &
Busse, 1983). Therefore, athletes, referees, coaches, and spectators should be aware of potential
judgment biases via the activation of inappropriate knowledge. Again, (video-based) feedback
training has been suggested as a measure to improve accuracy in categorization tasks, such as
recognizing a players offense in football (Helsen & Bultynck, 2004; Mascarenhas, OHare, &
Plessner, 2006).
Global judgments
While gender stereotypes can already have an inuence on local evaluations of aggressive
behaviorsfor example, Souchon et al. (2004) found that female handball players were granted
more penalties in similar situations than male playerstheir inuence can be even more dramatic
when it comes to the global evaluation of boys and girls abilities in sports. For example, the
work by Eccles and colleagues (Eccles, Freedman-Doan, Frome, Jacobs, & Yoon, 2000; Jacobs &
Eccles, 1992) showed that parents beliefs and stereotypes inuence their judgments and
expectations of their children. Among others, it has been found that mothers who endorsed the
traditional gender-role stereotyped belief that boys are naturally better in sports than girls
distorted the perception of their childs competence in sports in the gender-role stereotyped
direction. That is, if they were talking about a female child, their perception of their childs ability
was lower than what would have been predicted with more objective criteria (i.e., teachers
ratings). In addition, these expectancies were found to affect the opportunities that parents give
their children to develop sport skills and, thus, not only childrens self-perceptions but also, as a
self-fullling prophecy (Merton, 1948), their actual performances. The inuence of stereotypes on
global judgments may be even more pronounced when sports are involved that have a stronger
association with typical male rather than typical female characteristics, such as boxing or
bodybuilding (e.g., Freeman, 1988).
As mentioned, an advantage of categorical thinking is that the application of an adequate
category can be a helpful guide in adjusting peoples behavior to the behavior of their interaction
partners (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Categories, such as a person schema, typically include knowledge

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that allows inferences beyond the information given in a certain situation. For example, when we
play a tennis match against an opponent for the rst time, the prior information that she belongs
to the category of serve-and-volley players allows us to predict what she will do after her service
and to take adequate counter-measures in order to attain our goal of winning the match (e.g., to
concentrate on a sharp return). Accordingly, just as in general people seek actively for
information that allows them to form accurate impressions of other people when they engage in
social interactions, it can be assumed for competitions in sports that athletes look for cues that
facilitate appropriate categorizations of their opponents. Therefore, it is surprising that the
impression formation process among athletes has received little attention in the corresponding
literature so far. In two recent studies, however, Greenlees and colleagues examined the inuence
of an opponents body language and clothing on the rst impressions formed by observers in
tennis (Greenlees, Buscombe, Thelwell, Holder, & Rimmer, 2005) and in table-tennis (Greenlees,
Bradley, Holder, & Thelwell, 2005). Body language and clothing were chosen as variables because
other researchers have suggested that they are important interpersonal cues. While the inuence of
clothing is not obvious in both studies, there is strong evidence that body language exerts an
inuence on the impression formation process of athletes even when playing performance is
viewed. Players that displayed positive body language (e.g., erect posture) were rated, for example,
as more assertive, competitive, experienced, condent, and tter than players displaying negative
body language (e.g., hunched posture). In addition, participants reported higher expectations of
success against tennis players displaying negative body language than against tennis players
displaying positive body language (Greenlees, Buscombe et al., 2005). Accordingly, the authors
argue that the development of performance expectancies in the observation of a players body
language in the warm-up can directly affect his opponents performance. Although it is evident
from these studies that body language inuences impression formation among athletes beyond the
directly observed performances, this does not necessarily lead to wrong assessments of an
opponents strength. After all, a positive body language can indeed be an indicator of a selfcondent good tennis player. However, the knowledge of the inuence of these cues on an
opponents impression can also cause an athlete to use them in a strategic or even deceptive way
(Gilbert & Jamison, 1994; Hackfort & Schlattmann, 2002). Thus, a promising direction for future
research would be to study the validity of the different categorical cues that athletes use in
competitions in order to form accurate impressions of their opponents.

Memory processes
Local judgments
While the studies reported so far demonstrate that judgments of performance are potentially
biased by the activation of general memory structures, there is also some evidence for direct
memory inuences on the judgment of sport performances. Such inuences have been studied in
an impressive series of experiments by Ste-Marie and colleagues (Ste-Marie, 2003; Ste-Marie &
Lee, 1991; Ste-Marie & Valiquette, 1996; Ste-Marie, Valiquette, & Taylor, 2001). They
investigated how the memory of prior encounters with an athletes performance can inuence
actual performance judgments. In these experiments, a paradigm was developed that mirrors the

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warm-up/competition setting in gymnastics. In the rst phase of the experiment, judges watched a
series of gymnasts perform a simple element and decided whether the performance was perfect or
awed. The judges task was the same in the second phase that followed, except that the gymnastic
elements shared a relationship with the items shown in the rst phase. Some of the gymnasts were
shown during the second phase with the identical performance as in the rst phase (e.g., both
times perfect), and others were shown with the opposite performance (e.g., rst perfect and then
awed). In the condition where the performance in the rst and second phases differed, perceptual
judgments were less accurate than in the conditions where performances were the same for both
phases (Ste-Marie & Lee, 1991). These memory-inuenced biases occurred even with a week break
between the rst and second phases (Ste-Marie & Valiquette, 1996) and irrespective of the
cognitive task the judges had to perform during the rst phase (Ste-Marie, 2003). The robustness
of this effect supports the authors assumption that perceptual judgments, such as in judging
gymnastics, inevitably rely on retrieval from memory for prior episodes. Thus, the only way to
avoid these biases would be to prevent judges from seeing the gymnasts perform before a
competition (Ste-Marie & Lee, 1991).
Prior processing effects are side effects of the rather positive memory feature of enhancing
perception through automatic learning processes (Jacoby, 1983). A comparable rather negative
feature of human memory is its susceptibility to intrusion errors and presupposition effects (e.g.,
Fiedler, Walther, Armbruster, Fey, & Naumann, 1996; Loftus, 1975). Such constructive memory
effects have been studied in the domain of sports by Walther, Fiedler, Horn, and Zembrod (2002).
In their experimental study, football experts and non-experts were presented with various scenes
from a videotaped European-Cup match. Among other manipulations, half of the participants
were told after the video presentation that the team dressed in yellow won the match while the
other half received the information that this team lost. Afterwards they were asked to rate the
observed performance of the teams in yellow on various dimensions (e.g., ability and ght). It was
found that experts were even more susceptible to the result-manipulation than non-experts. For
example, when they believed that the yellow team won they were more likely to reconstruct the
match in accordance with their implicit theory that a win on this level is rather due to an
advantage in ghting than in ability. When they believed that the yellow team lost they rated its
ability higher and its ghting during the game lower. Together, this study demonstrates that postevent information can exert an important inuence on the evaluation of sport performance from
memory.
Global judgments
A similar effect has been studied by Unkelbach, Plessner, and Fiedler (2006) in another
experimental application of the sampling approach (Fiedler, 2000) to global judgments of sports
performance, that is, the rating of a football players ability. While most empirical work on the
sampling approach is concerned with information sampling from the environment (e.g., Plessner
et al., 2001), this approach can also account for effects of selective sampling from memory. In
order to test this assumption, Unkelbach et al. (2006) used a well-documented effect in social
cognition research, the category-split effect: When people estimate the frequency of instances in a
social category, the overall estimate is higher when the category is split into smaller sub-categories
(Fiedler & Armbruster, 1994). The basic idea was that splitting a positive feature (e.g., excellent

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technical skills) of a player should result in a more favorable judgment when a negative feature
(e.g., a lack of physical tness) is not split and vice versa when the negative features are split and
the positive features are not. In the experiment, sport coaches attended to a presentation about a
player, which, besides some background information about age, former clubs, and so forth,
contained an equal amount of positive and negative information, the former always related to his
technical skill, the latter always related to his lacking tness. After participants saw this
presentation, the crucial category-split manipulation followed. Half of the participants were
assigned to a positive split condition, and were asked about the players pass-game, dribbling,
shots and ball-security, all items that fell under the general category technical skill. In
comparison, they were asked about his physical tness in general. The remaining participants
were assigned to a negative split condition and evaluated his technical skill in general, whereas
the category physical tness was split into the instances of speed, jump, stamina and
aggressiveness. In the nal overall evaluations, it was found that the player was evaluated more
positively when the positive category was split and more negatively when the negative category
was split. As in the study by Plessner et al. (2001), coaches were blind for this sampling
manipulation and did not correct their judgments accordingly.
The only other memory effect that has been studied in the domain of global judgments of sports
performance so far refers to the use of the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).
This heuristic allows people to base, for example, frequency judgments on the ease with which
events can be retrieved instead of retrieving and counting all relevant instances. While this
heuristic provides good results under many circumstances, it can also bias judgments if factors
unrelated to the actual number of occurrences inuence the retrieval process. For example, the
ease with which the rst (sensational) victory of Boris Becker in Wimbledon can be retrieved may
lead to a relative overestimation of his weeks as world number one in comparison to the record of
a player with less salient victories (e.g., Jim Courier). Indeed, Young and French (1998) found
rankings of the greatest heavyweights of all time by noted boxing historians to be biased in line
with the use of an availability heuristic, that is, ghters from more recent years were
overrepresented in comparison to ghters who had their greatest time before the birth of the
historians. One can easily imagine similar effects of availability on more short time rankings such
as FIFA World Player of the Year.

Information integration
Local judgment
In the nal step of social information processing, information about an athletes performance
that has been encoded and categorized, together with information that has been retrieved from
memory, are integrated into a judgment. Ideally, a judge considers all the relevant information for
a judgment task at hand and integrates this information in the most appropriate, analytical way.
However, because the human capacities to process information are limited and social situations
often introduce constraints such as time pressure, people frequently use short cuts to cope with
complex judgment situations. An example of these shortcuts, as mentioned, is the availability
heuristic or the use of schematic knowledge, which is classied as top-down processing (e.g., Fiske

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& Neuberg, 1990). Unfortunately, little is known about when and why judges in sports switch
between bottom-up and top-down processing. Research on information integration processes in
sports performance judgments typically focuses on the more or less deliberate use of information
beyond the observable performance. An important question that arises from this research is, how
adaptive is the use of this information? For example, the hot hand phenomenon in sports like
basketball, where a particular player is on a shooting streak and thus should be given more
shots, has been shown to be a fallacy (Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985). The same is true for
many other myths or irrational illusions in sports (Ayton, 1998; Gilovich, 1984a; Russel, 2001). In
a recent analysis, however, Burns (2004) was able to show that streaks are valid cues for deciding
to whom a player should pass the ball in order to maximize the teams scoring potential. Thus,
using the belief in the hot hand may be an adaptive decision strategy even when it is normatively
wrong. An important question that follows from this assumption is, which are the nonperformance cues that judges in sports typically use in their decisions and how adaptive is their
usage?
Nevill et al. (2002) investigated whether crowd noise has an inuence on soccer referees
decisions concerning potential foul situations. They assumed that referees have learned to use
crowd noise as a decision cue because in general it may serve as a useful indicator for the
seriousness of the foul. However, because the reaction of a crowd is usually biased against the
away team, the use of this knowledge may be inappropriate and contribute to the well-conrmed
phenomenon of a home advantage in team sports (Courneya & Carron, 1992). In an experiment,
referees assessed various challenges videotaped from a match in the English Premier League. Half
of the referees observed the video with the original crowd noise audible, whereas the other half
viewed the video in silence. This presence or absence of crowd noise had a strong effect on
decisions made by the referees. Most importantly, referees who viewed challenges in the noise
condition awarded signicantly fewer fouls against the home team than those observing the video
in silence. The authors concluded that this effect might be partly due to heuristic judgment
processes in which the salient, yet potentially biased, judgment of the crowd served as a decision
cue for referees. In addition, this study demonstrates how biased referees decisions can contribute
to the phenomenon of a home advantage in sports (see also Balmer, Nevill, & Lane, 2005; Sutter
& Kocher, 2004).
Recent studies showed that referees are not only inuenced by situational cues but by their own
prior decisions. In an experimental study, Plessner and Betsch (2001) found a negative
contingency between football referees successive penalty decisions concerning the same team,
that is, the probability of awarding a penalty to a team decreased when they had awarded a
penalty to this team in a similar situation before and increased when they had not. The opposite
effect occurred with successive penalty decisions concerning rst one and then the other team.
Similar results have been found with basketball referees when contact situations were presented in
their original game sequence but not when they were presented as random successions of
individual scenes (Brand, Schmidt, & Schneeloch, 2006). Thus, these effects may be partly due to
referees goal of being fair in the management of a game (Mascarenhas, Collins, & Mortimer,
2002; Rains, 1984).
Sequential effects point also to the fact that social judgments are comparative in nature
(Mussweiler, 2003). The judgment of an athletes performance is frequently based on the
comparison with other athletes, or with prior judgments of other athletes performance,

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respectively. Accordingly, several studies show that social comparisons determine evaluative
processes in judging athletes in various sports (e.g., Ebbeck, 1990; Gotwals & Wayment, 2002;
Sheldon, 2003; Van Yperen, 1992). Recent research suggests that the consequences of such
comparisons are produced by the selective accessibility mechanism of similarity and dissimilarity
testing (Mussweiler, 2003). That means, starting the comparison process with the focus on
similarities increases the likelihood of an assimilation judgment toward the standard of
comparison. The focus on dissimilarities, however, is more likely to end up in a contrast effect
away from a standard. These assumptions were recently applied to the sequential judgment of
gymnastic routines on vault by experienced judges (Damisch, Mussweiler, & Plessner, 2006). Two
athletes were introduced to the judges as belonging either to the same national team (similarity
focus) or to different teams (dissimilarity focus). The routines of both gymnasts had to be
evaluated in a sequence. While the second routine was the same in all conditions, half of the
participants rst saw a better routine (high standard), while the other half rst saw a worse
routine (low standard). As predicted, the second gymnasts score was assimilated toward the
standard when both gymnasts were introduced as belonging to the same team. The opposite effect
occurred when the judges believed the gymnasts belonged to different teams.
While most of the reported biases so far are due to the functioning of the cognitive information
processing system, it is clear that many biases in judgments or sport performance also have a
motivational background. Starting with the work by Hastorf and Cantril (1954), there is plenty of
evidence that group membership has a distorting inuence on the judgment of sport performances
(Ansorge & Scheer, 1988; de Fiore & Kramer, 1982; Markman & Hirt, 2002; Mohr & Larsen,
1998; Seltzer & Glass, 1991; Ste-Marie, 1996; Whissel, Lyons, Wilkinson, & Whissel, 1993). Thus,
achieving accuracy is not the only motivation that should be taken into account when studying
biases in the judgment of sport performance. To conform to a norm may be just another goal
(Rainey & Larsen, 1988; Rainey, Larsen, Stephenson, & Olson, 1993; Scheer, Ansorge, &
Howard, 1983; Vanden Auweele, Boen, De Geest, & Feys, 2004; Wanderer, 1987). So far, only
one study has directly assessed whether inuences like these are automatic or unconscious (SteMarie, 1996). However, no support was found for the hypothesis of unconscious inuences.
Global judgments
A belief that many people involved in sports share is that athletes who started with an
outstanding rst season are susceptible to the so called sophomore slump. The sophomore slump
is a signicant decline in performance during the second year (Taylor & Cuave, 1994). As with the
hot-hand phenomenon, it has been argued that the sophomore slump does not really exist but is a
cognitive illusion based on a lack of understanding of regression to the mean (Gilovich, 1984b).
According to this position, outstanding performances in the rst year are just as likely to regress
toward their actual level of ability as the statistical tendency of extreme scores to move toward the
group means. However, in a careful analysis of the performance of 83 hitters and 22 pitchers who
had an outstanding rst year in the Major Baseball League, Taylor and Cuave (1994) found a
signicant decline in the second year in the number of home runs. This trend is consistent with the
assumption of a real sophomore slump. The results of other performance measures (batting
average and runs batted in) were also consistent with the sophomore slump as with the regression
to the mean explanation. Thus, peoples failure to understand statistical tendencies together with

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some real declines in performances may jointly produce a stronger belief in the sophomore slump
than would be warranted on the basis of the actual career development of outstanding rst-year
athletes alone.
The accurate assessment of an athletes or a teams strength is also of interest for the increasing
number of people who invest their money in the betting market. Several recent studies explore the
quality of experts predictions of the outcomes of sporting events and their use of information in
making these predictions (e.g., Andersson, Edman, & Ekman, 2005). So far, however, a rather low
quality of expert predictions has been reported in these studies and little is known about the
factors that can help to improve prediction accuracy. While in general one can assume that
predictions are less prone to biases the more people think about their judgments and the more
performance relevant information they gather and integrate in an analytic way (Vertinsky,
Kanetkar, Vertinsky, & Wilson, 1986), there is also evidence that a less analytical judgment style
can improve predictions of sports events. Halberstadt and Levine (1999) asked basketball experts
to make predictions for the outcomes of actual basketball games. Half of the participants were
asked to analyze reasons for their predictions before making them, the other half was asked to rely
on their spontaneous feelings. The reasoners were found to predict fewer winners of the games
than the nonreasoners, that is, analytical thinking led to a decrease in prediction accuracy. A
possible explanation for this effect is that deliberation hinders the use of potentially valid decision
cues, such as the feelings that are associated with a teams strength. Furthermore, these feelings
may accurately reect the entire information about a teams strength that an expert had
encountered before (Betsch, Plessner, & Schallies, 2004). Therefore, one could argue that the use
of affective responses deserves greater attention in future studies on performance judgments in
sports.

Conclusions and outlook

We presented an overview of empirical work on biases in judgments of sport performance (see
Table 1). It is evident that many biases that have been documented in the social cognition
literature are well and alive in the world of sports. Moreover, some research on judgments of sport
performance discovered unique judgment phenomena, such as the belief in the hot hand
phenomenon (Gilovich et al., 1985) and sequential effects in penalty decisions (Plessner & Betsch,
2001), that can stimulate theory development in the social cognition literature. By taking a social
cognitive perspective, we were able to identify different cognitive processes at different stages of
social information processing that underlie the formation of biased judgments of sport
performance. These analyses can help to develop useful measures to improve decision making
in sports. For example, if the source of a judgment bias is clearly identied on the processing stage
of perception, the accuracy can be improved by determining better viewing positions (e.g., Ford et
al., 1997) and by the application of training techniques that help judges to overcome perceptual
limitations (e.g., Craven, 1998; Jendrusch, 2002). Problems that arise from the activation of
inappropriate knowledge structures on the stage of encoding/categorization can be addressed by
the development of specic video-based feedback training (Helsen & Bultynck, 2004;
Mascarenhas, OHare, & Plessner, 2006). However, it will be more difcult to prevent biases
that stem from unrepresentative information samples and memory intrusions. Normally, people

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do not recognize biased information samples either from the environment or from memory and
have no insight into the danger of the sampling trap (Fiedler & Wanke, 2004). Therefore,
increasing sports judges awareness and sensibility for these sources of biased performance
judgments would be at least a rst step. It is even more problematic to propose measures that
would prevent supposed biases that stem from different processes of information integration.
First, one has to prove for every reported inuence of non-performance factors if their
consideration in a judgment does not serve a legitimate goal beyond the aim for accuracy and,
thus, mirrors an adaptive decision strategy.
Altogether, the application of a social cognition perspective is promising in the goal of gaining
further understanding of sports performance judgments. Although our overview is based on a
reasonable number of studies, the social cognition perspective provides many more links and new
developments that can help to improve the understanding of sport behavior. For example, many
social judgment biases have recently been found to depend on judges cultural background. In a
football eld study, Snibbe, Kitayama, Markus, and Suzuki (2003) found an intergroup bias as
reported in the study by Hastorf and Cantril (1954) only for European American students, but not
for Japanese students. Thus, culture seems to be an important factor that has to be taken into
account in future studies on the evaluation of sport performances (see also Tiryaki, 2005).
Another promising development for the study of judgments in sports is the increasing interest of
social cognition researchers in implicit as opposed to explicit representations (e.g. Greenwald &
Banaji, 1995). Implicit structures, such as implicit attitudes, are assumed to be activated
automatically and to exert an inuence on spontaneous responses. Judgments in sports are
frequently executed under time pressure and with limited control. Therefore, implicit structures
may play an important role in the formation of performance judgments. These are just two
examples of recent developments in social cognition that can have an additional stimulating effect
on the study of sports performance judgments.

Acknowledgments
We thank Clare MacMahon for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
Financial support is gratefully acknowledged from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft via the
Sonderforschungsbereich 504 (TP A10) to the rst author.

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