Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [61]
Sports psychologists offer several explanations for this variance. Situational states affect personality traits, and these traits vary, with some athletes far more at ease under pressure (think of Reggie Jackson as “Mr. October” or Jerry West as “Mr. Clutch”), while others falter (think of Bill Buckner’s infamous through-the-legs error that squelched the Boston Red Sox’s best chance for a World Series victory or Scott Norwood’s muffed field goal in the closing seconds of the Buffalo Bills’ only opportunity for a Super Bowl ring). Personality research on elite athletes shows that they are high in stimulus seeking, risk taking, competitiveness, self-confidence, expectation for success, and the ability to regulate stress. They practice a lot, come prepared with a contingency plan for changes in the competition, stay focused on the event, block out distracting stimuli, rehearse their task mentally before the game, follow their own plans and not those of the competitor, are not flustered by unexpected events, learn from mistakes, and never give up. Personality matters.
The Hot-Streak Myth
Such psychological influences also depend on the complexity of the task, with social facilitation, for example, more beneficial for simple and well-practiced skills but less helpful for difficult tasks that are less rehearsed. Pedaling a bicycle or lifting a barbell is not in the same league of complexity as putting a golf ball or executing a gymnastics routine. The hundred thousand screaming fans lining the final kilometers of a leg-burning climb up the French Alps in the Tour de France that might catapult a cyclist onto the winner’s podium could cause a golfer to knock a chip into the sand trap or a gymnast to do a face-plant into the mat. Context counts. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, discovered that the level of superstition among Trobriand Island fishermen depended on the level of uncertainty of the outcome—the farther out to sea they went, the more complex their superstitious rituals became. If we think of fishing as a sport, we see a striking parallel in baseball where batters, the best of whom fail nearly seven times out of every ten trips to the plate, are notorious for their superstitious rituals, whereas fielders, typically successful nine out of every ten times a ball is hit to them, have correspondingly fewer superstitions. And remember that this difference is expressed in the same players!
Also affecting athletic performance is physiological arousal, depicted in the infamous “inverted-U” diagram—the two feet of the inverted U are firmly planted on the low end of the performance gradient while the neck of the U represents peak performance. Levels of arousal too low or too high are deleterious, but a medium amount generates what is needed for optimal operation. The principle also applies to the so-called home court advantage. Anecdotally, we all “know” that competitors have an advantage when playing at home, and teams strive all season to finish with the best record in order to get it. But research qualifies the effect. On average and in the long run, football and baseball teams do slightly better at their own stadiums than at their competitors’, and basketball and hockey teams do significantly better at home than away (the smaller arenas of the latter presumably enhance social facilitation). But here we might think of regular season play as falling into the idealized middle of the inverted U, with preseason on the low arousal end and postseason on the high. For example, one study showed that in the baseball World Series from 1924 to 1982, in series that went five games or more, the home team won 60 percent of the first two games but only 40 percent of the remaining games. Interestingly, in the twenty-six series that