Fast and frugal heuristics in sports

Abstract

Objectives: This paper summarizes the fast-and-frugal-heuristics (FFH) approach to judgment and decision making, particularly as it applies to sports. The aim is to provide a framework through which current sports psychologists may apply this approach to better understand sports decision making. Methods: FFH are studied using a variety of methods, including (1) computer simulations and mathematical analysis of heuristic performance as it depends on environmental structure (what we call the ecological rationality of heuristics); (2) empirical analysis of the heuristics, performance in naturally occurring environments; and (3) experimental research examining whether people actually use the identified heuristics. Results: Simulations and analysis have shown that FFH can perform as well as complicated optimizing models while using less information and without integrating this information. Furthermore, in many cases FFH are more robust than optimizing models, outperforming these models when generalizing to new cases. Conclusion: FFH depart from many models of human decision making in that they set a reasonable standard of rationality based on real-world constraints such as (a) limited time, information, and cognitive capacity, (b) decision tasks that may have no calculable optimal solution, and (c) the structured environments within which humans have learned and evolved. These simple heuristics are particularly

Influence of intellectual impairment (II) on basketball players´ capacity to solve a game situation: towards evidence-based classification systems in II-basketball

“…However, other more recent theories indicated that the decision making process is not just a result of cognitive calculations comparable to computer software: also individual´s preferences and contextual factors are relevant in this process (Busemeyer & Townsend, 1993;Raab, 2002;Busemeyer & Johnson, 2003). In addition, the Fast and Frugal Heuristic (FFH) approach of decision making (Bennis & Pachur, 2006;Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996) indicated that to solve a problem (heuristic), decisions have to be made with high speed (fast), which is given by the individual´s capacity to use less information or require fewer cognitive steps (frugal). Other authors called this Intuitive Decision Making (Dane, Rockmann, & Pratt, 2012).…”

Confidence-Sourcing Among Amateur Soccer Players: Interpreting Time, Place and Stimulus-Relevance

“…This relativistic reasoning also highlights how a context-sensitive approach to confidence-raising can be a powerful tool for sport coaches outside of the elite domain. One does not, it appears, require hard quantitative measures or performance analysis outputs to generate trust in the ability of others; indeed, the capacity of participants to address singular qualitative cases of strong performances by team mates as evidence that these would recur "when it mattered" would seem to indicate a rather more heuristic than "systematic" approach to finding evidence for such beliefs [30,31]. In short, the vivid example would seem to be a more powerful boon to confidence among sporting participants at this level than the "factual evidence" more commonly relied upon by elite coaches and sport scientists in their decision-making [32].…”

Heuristic Reasoning and the Observer's View: The Influence of Example-Availability onad-hocFrequency Judgments in Sport

“…(Schwarz, et al, 1991, p. 197) This proposition has (subsequent to the original work of Schwarz and colleagues) been corroborated by research on a number of phenomena involving probability and frequency judgements, such as selfevaluation of memory capacity (Winkielman, et al, 1998), and susceptibility to health problems (Rothman & Schwarz, 1998). As previously outlined, however, exploration of general heuristic Running head: HEURISTIC REASONING AND THE OBSERVER'S VIEW reasoning in sport psychology -and the availability heuristic in particular -has to date been rather limited in terms of total research conducted, and also in terms scope, with the bulk of papers attending almost exclusively to the issue of athletic performance (such as Bennis & Pachur, 2006). One of the best contemporary examples of work outside of the direct athlete-performance realm, however, is the work of Souchon et al (2009) '...the standard of competition interacted with the ambiguity of the offence to predict the disciplinary decision.…”