Pender Podcast: World Cup Series, The Bias for Action

Yeah, for sure.

Um, pretty, it is pretty fascinating actually, and I, you know, I do believe that, uh, there is this kind of, uh, crossroads between, uh, you know, soccer and business and psychology, and after all, it's a human endeavor, so it's pretty...

You know, there's a lot of, uh, similarities there.

But yeah, ultimately, a, a, a number of years ago, actually, uh, researchers actually looked into the same question, just trying to figure out, you know, how to, um, you know, how should goalkeepers sort of optimize their, their save percentages and, um, and, and what have you.

And, you know, what they noted was that on average, you know, when a penalty kick was, was taken, uh, usually about a third of the time it was left, a third center, and a third right.

So, like, you know, pretty much a third, a third.

Not exactly, but that's roughly what happened.

Uh, but what they found is what, uh, goalkeepers actually did, and this was across, I believe it was about 311 different matches that they studied.

Uh, on average, they went either left or right 94% of the time.

So, you know, essentially they never stood in the middle, even though, like, a third of the kicks were on average in the middle.

So again, like, uh, if you are going to, you know, uh, take a shot, you probably should take it through the middle because the goalies have this sort of, they're gonna go to either side.

Uh, and the other thing is that on average, uh, the shots that did get shot in the middle, if they stay in the center, they saved about 60% of them.

So that's a pretty high percentage.

So if you jumped left or right, you, and if you, even if you guessed correctly, you wouldn't get 60%.

So really the optimal thing is usually at least to stay in the middle, at least a third of the time.

Uh, so, uh, this wasn't the case.

Uh, so then they went and, uh, talked to, you know, these, these goalkeepers.

I think there's, like, 32 different professional goalkeepers and, you know, they're asking them, like, you know, "Why do you do this stuff?" Um, and you know, essentially, you know, what the answers essentially boiled down to was they wanted to minimize, you know, their regret.

So it was really sort of, like, this bias for action 'cause they just felt like they just didn't wanna feel like they did nothing.

[laughs] And, uh, of course they should, they should have done nothing, uh, much of the time.

Not all the time, but much of the time.

Um, and so this is sort of like the sort of, uh, you know, is sort of these pondries, you know, of, of, of soccer and it sort of matches a lot what happens in investing too.

So it's, again, it's, it's, it's an interesting crossroads when you think about it.

Yeah.

No, it's, it reminds me a lot of kind of how important the psychology is just within sports as well as within investing, is kind of the perception of others and the perception of not doing something weighs so heavily on kind of strategic or logical decision-making.