The impact of a team's aggressive reputation on the decisions of association football referees

Abstract

It has been suggested that individuals may use heuristic methods of reasoning and rely on schemata when a quick decision is necessary. Accordingly, it is possible that decisions made by sport officials may be influenced by prior knowledge they have about teams they are officiating. The aim of the present study was to determine whether sport officials are more likely to penalize individuals who participate in a team with an aggressive reputation. In a balanced design, 38 football referees were randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group and were presented with the same 50 video clips of incidents from football games, all involving a team in a blue strip ('blue team'). The incidents were categorized before the study by five experienced referees into fouls committed both by, and against, the blue team, where all participants agreed that a foul had been committed (certain incidents), disagreed it was a foul (uncertain incidents) or agreed that there was no foul (innocuous incidents). Both groups received written instructions before the task; in addition, the experimental group was informed that the blue team present in all of the clips had a reputation for foul and aggressive play. For each incident, the participants were required to indicate what action they would engage in if refereeing the game. Although there was no difference in the number of decisions made, the experimental group awarded significantly more red and yellow cards against the blue team both overall and for the 'certain' incidents. It is suggested that prior knowledge may impact referees' behaviour in a laboratory setting, although future research should explore whether a similar effect is observed in the behaviour of referees during football matches.

Athletes' Use of Reputation and Gender Information When Forming Initial Expectancies of Coaches

“…This is in line with Olson et al's [1] model of expectancy processes, which proposes that expectancies may be based on indirect Expectancy formation within the coach-athlete relationship 6 experience in the form of the beliefs of other people (i.e., third-parties). Moreover, Manley et al's findings concur with initial evidence to support the notion that thirdparty reports such as reputation can impact on the expectancies formed by sports personnel such as judges [18], referees [19], and coaches [20]. However, given that third-party reports have only recently been identified as a stand-alone category of information sources that may be used in the formation of expectancies, their influence on the creation of athletes' initial expectancies of coaches is worthy of further investigation.…”

“…Thus, the first aim of the present study is to discover the extent to which athletes' expectancies of coach competency are influenced by third-party reports via the manipulation of coach reputation (i.e., successful vs. unsuccessful). In light of evidence from previous research [17,18,19], it is hypothesised that athletes will provide significantly more favourable ratings of coaching competency for targets who have a successful reputation as opposed to an unsuccessful reputation.…”

An Examination of the Associations Between Facial Structure, Aggressive Behavior, and Performance in the 2010 World Cup Association Football Players

“…An alternative explanation for the present finding is that a player's reputation may influence referee's judgment of whether a foul was committed (Jones et al 2002). Multiple studies have demonstrated that FWHR is related to personality judgments made by others (e.g., Carré et al 2009;Haselhuhn, Wong, and Ormiston, 2013;Stirrat and Perrett 2010) thus it is plausible that a referee's judgment could have been influenced by this bias.…”

Do judges enhance home advantage in European championship boxing?

“…Interestingly, this bias seems to have changed little across time (Campbell & Galbraith, 1996) despite considerable interest in the issue, notably at the 1978 World Figure Skating Championships where the USSR judging delegation was suspended as a result of such bias. Furthermore, bias has been identified as a result of within-team order (Ansorge, Scheer, Laub, & Howard, 1978;Scheer & Ansorge, 1975) and as a result of prior knowledge for both subjectively judged disciplines (Ste-Marie and Lee, 1996;Ste-Marie & Valiquette, 1996) and interestingly in football (Jones, Paull, & Erskine, 2002). Recent evidence also suggests that bias in subjectively judged sports may also extend to home advantage (Balmer, Nevill, & Williams, 2001;Balmer et al, 2003).…”