A Sinister Bias for Calling Fouls in Soccer

Alexander Kranjec, Matthew Lehet, Bianca Bromberger and Anjan Chatterjee

PLOS ONE, 2010, vol. 5, issue 7, 1-4

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.

Date: 2010
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0011667

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011667

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