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TWO WAYS THAT WE FORM JUDGEMENTS WHEN WATCHING FOOTBALL
1. Availability
Making use of the Availability Heuristic entails forming judgements based on the ease with which instances come to mind. When examples come to mind immediately and fluidly, this induces a pleasant sense of cognitive ease, this sense is often mistaken as a marker of validity. To give a classic example, if you've just seen news of a plane crash on the news, you're temporarily less comfortable with the idea of flying. A major asset of availability is recency (recency functions as a resource of availability because one of the major things that makes instances easier to retrieve is their recent occurrence or activation), so we'll start there...
Recency (in relation to judgements of Quality)
Imagine Robin Van Persie has just scored a belter. You will, for the time being, have an inflated sense of his ability. Commentators will talk about all the great things he's done, it will be easier to remember the good things than the bad. Imagine Yakubu has just missed a sitter. Your opinion of him deflates slightly. If you were ambiguous towards him, you will temporarily lean towards the view that he is possessing of intermediate skill.
Recency (in relation to judgements of Quantity)
You are asked how often goals are scored from corners minutes after Liverpool, having gone close a couple of times, finally bury one. You will almost certainly overestimate the frequency with which goals arise in such situations (as of Jan 22nd, 2,371 corners had been taken in the Premier League this season, with 63 resulting in goals - in fact, if you take the scenario given above, of Liverpool scoring from a corner, this is remarkably rare, they've managed to convert just 1 out of 117). So, to recall previous work done on this blog, work presently being milked for much more than it's worth, if you'd just seen Chris Eriksen net a stunning direct free-kick, you'd probably overestimate the regularity with which direct free-kicks are stunningly converted in the Premier League (the figure, as we stated before, was 33 out of 577 for the 2013-2014 season). And, if you were Martin Keown, and you'd just seen a wall obscure the goalkeepers view of a goalbound effort, you might question why teams bother erecting them.
Availability Bias and Judging Defenders
We've said it on here before, but most of the time people pay much less attention to defensive skill compared with attacking talent. You can comfortably ignore Vincent Kompany for fourty-eight minutes, then watch him make a great tackle. Associative memory will fill in any blanks, and all the available evidence that it has dredged up will tell you that Vince is a kick-ass defender (he mostly is, but sometimes he isn't) having a kick-ass game. It is all the information you brain has for you, and you're more than happy to use it to form a judgement (at some later date we shall deal with "Judgements Based on Insufficient Evidence" - it's sure to be a belter).
Availability Bias and Judging Defenders
We've said it on here before, but most of the time people pay much less attention to defensive skill compared with attacking talent. You can comfortably ignore Vincent Kompany for fourty-eight minutes, then watch him make a great tackle. Associative memory will fill in any blanks, and all the available evidence that it has dredged up will tell you that Vince is a kick-ass defender (he mostly is, but sometimes he isn't) having a kick-ass game. It is all the information you brain has for you, and you're more than happy to use it to form a judgement (at some later date we shall deal with "Judgements Based on Insufficient Evidence" - it's sure to be a belter).
2. Expectancy Violation
It won't surprise you to know that you have expectations. You expect certain events to be more likely than others, you expect certain players to do certain things more than you expect other players to do them. You make intuitive predictions all the time without realising it. You don't look for falling pianos, because you don't expect falling pianos. When you see Chelsea vs Bradford on the fixture sheet, your brain pops up with 'Chelsea win' before you've even had a second to think about it. We're dealing with that situation where Bradford wins and there occurs an expectancy violation.
Matt "Heskey" Mills
If you missed it, Bolton were missing big Emile for their fourth round cup replay against Liverpool. To compensate, they started the game with career-long centre back Matt Mills partnering Eidur Gudjohnsen in attack. Now, granted, Neil Lennon might've considered the big centre half to be a liability in defence, or a potent threat in attack. It's neither here nor there. The commentators said he'd done well. Given that this was a ploy you'd expect to fail, the fact that it hadn't gone down in flames produced a rating which was unjustly positive. Were you judging Mills as a striker, rather than as a defender masquerading as a striker, you'd have said he had a very indifferent game. Judging him as someone who was expected to fail miserably, and didn't, produces an unfairly positive judgement of his display. Likewise, how many teams have been said to be doing well, simply because they were expected to get deplorably battered? As recently as Sunday Cheikou Kouyate, parked out of position at centre-back for West Ham-Man Utd, won the Man of the Match award (don't get me wrong, he did do quite well).
Young Players, and the Violation of Expectancy
Zach Clough is a player who has caught a lot of attention this week. If you watched the Liverpool game, you'd have heard his name being mentioned approximately once every 3.2 seconds. And it was pretty unanimously positive stuff. Why? Well, he's nineteen. We apparently have low expectations of young players, and therefore immediately overrate them when they perform competently. Take Adnan Januzaj as an example. He played quite well a couple of times last season, and is now being paid SIXTY THOUSAND pounds a week to contribute extraordinarily little. We begin with negative expectations of young players' ability relative to senior players (in reality the difference is much much less than we assume, players develop relatively little once they are full grown adults, simply maturing slightly in their mental attributes : by the time they're old enough to play they're technically, and often mentally, set in their ways) so when the expectation that they will struggle is violated (as it almost always is) the resultant judgement is exaggerated. It's worth looking out for next time Harrison Reed completes a pass or Matthew Targett doesn't fall on his backside (with such an incident Targett, as a defender, arrives at the intersection of expectancy and availability and comes out looking like Jesus Christ, or at the very least Sam Byram). Paddy McNair is a terrific example. Being on the fringes of the reserves at the start of the campaign he was expected to fail miserably in the first team. Having avoided doing that, he's suddenly being talked about as a future Northern Ireland international.
Young Players, and the Violation of Expectancy
Zach Clough is a player who has caught a lot of attention this week. If you watched the Liverpool game, you'd have heard his name being mentioned approximately once every 3.2 seconds. And it was pretty unanimously positive stuff. Why? Well, he's nineteen. We apparently have low expectations of young players, and therefore immediately overrate them when they perform competently. Take Adnan Januzaj as an example. He played quite well a couple of times last season, and is now being paid SIXTY THOUSAND pounds a week to contribute extraordinarily little. We begin with negative expectations of young players' ability relative to senior players (in reality the difference is much much less than we assume, players develop relatively little once they are full grown adults, simply maturing slightly in their mental attributes : by the time they're old enough to play they're technically, and often mentally, set in their ways) so when the expectation that they will struggle is violated (as it almost always is) the resultant judgement is exaggerated. It's worth looking out for next time Harrison Reed completes a pass or Matthew Targett doesn't fall on his backside (with such an incident Targett, as a defender, arrives at the intersection of expectancy and availability and comes out looking like Jesus Christ, or at the very least Sam Byram). Paddy McNair is a terrific example. Being on the fringes of the reserves at the start of the campaign he was expected to fail miserably in the first team. Having avoided doing that, he's suddenly being talked about as a future Northern Ireland international.
Robin Van Persie vs Danny Ings
For those who haven't been paying attention, Danny is being touted as a possible target for Liverpool, Tottenham and even Manchester "don't worry about renting a room, we'll just buy the hotel" City. He has played in 107 league games for Burnley, and scored 34 goals. At Premier League level, he has 7 league goals in 20 games. Robin has 9 in 21 this season. When we see Ings' stat we go "yeah, that's alright". But of Robin we are severely disappointed, even though he's doing better.
the Basic Function of Expectancy in Judgements
If you expect sucking, and get a decent performance, you end up with a distorted judgement that favours whoever it was that was expected to suck. If Leo Messi and Jese Rodriguez achieve identical stats, you're disappointed in one player and not in another, one is judged to be doing well, and the other is struggling. It's a question of violation of expectations. If you expect a five year old to read at a five year old level, and he turns out to read at a seven year old level, this becomes a very credible five year old. Whereas a seven year old in the reverse situation is very close to being diagnosed as dyslexic.
In Summary...
It's worth mulling over the reasons why your brain has arrived at the judgement it seems to have arrived at before you go about expressing it to people. It's also quite fun to see these processes at work in commentators (and Robbie Savage), who are very prone to temporarily believing that some striker they've only seen twelve minutes of is the next big thing, or that Paddy McNair isn't a League One player.
the Basic Function of Expectancy in Judgements
If you expect sucking, and get a decent performance, you end up with a distorted judgement that favours whoever it was that was expected to suck. If Leo Messi and Jese Rodriguez achieve identical stats, you're disappointed in one player and not in another, one is judged to be doing well, and the other is struggling. It's a question of violation of expectations. If you expect a five year old to read at a five year old level, and he turns out to read at a seven year old level, this becomes a very credible five year old. Whereas a seven year old in the reverse situation is very close to being diagnosed as dyslexic.
In Summary...
It's worth mulling over the reasons why your brain has arrived at the judgement it seems to have arrived at before you go about expressing it to people. It's also quite fun to see these processes at work in commentators (and Robbie Savage), who are very prone to temporarily believing that some striker they've only seen twelve minutes of is the next big thing, or that Paddy McNair isn't a League One player.
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