| Sport: An Academic’s Perfect Laboratory |
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bridges vol. 26, July 2010 / Pielke's Perspective By Roger A. Pielke mp3 download 
Big sporting events tend to bring out the armchair social scientists. For instance, when Europe advanced only three teams to the quarterfinals of this year's World Cup it was hailed by some as an indication of the decline Europe's geopolitical standing role, to the benefit of South America. That theory lasted only about as long as it took for Argentina and Brazil to fly home after losing to rivals from Old Europe. Similarly, Gideon Rachmon of the Financial Times points to the columnist in Spain's El País who suggested that "England's loss to Germany over the weekend reflects Thatcherism's demoralising effects on the English proletariat. (And there was I, thinking that it had something to do with lumbering centre-backs and a disallowed goal.)"
As much fun as it is to poke fun at sports-infused pseudo-social science, there is actually much of value to be gleaned from sports for understanding human behavior and important societal questions. For instance, in 2009 two scholars at the Wharton School of Business released a creative study of decision making among professional golfers to assess bias in decision making. The study utilized a data set of more than 2.5 million putts from 421 golfers over a period of five years. In the study the scholars wanted to see if there was any difference in putts made for par (what a golfer is supposed to score on a hole) versus birdie (one stoke less than par). The study found that for putts of equal length, professional golfers made putts for birdie at a rate less than for par. What is the reason for this difference? Golfers played more conservatively when putting for birdie knowing that a miss would lead to a par, whereas a missed putt for par left them with an unsavory bogey. The paper provided a robust confirmation of the notion of "loss aversion" in decision making. Like the rest of us, professional golfers would rather avoid a negative outcome than achieve a positive outcome with exactly the same quantitative value. Golf, like many sports, provides an ideal setting for exploring understandings of human behavior and decision making: You have highly skilled and experienced decision making that occurs in a controlled setting, governed by known rules, and with an enormous amount of data available. Academics are rarely able to create such settings via research grants. Sport provides a ready-made laboratory for exploring a wide range of social and policy sciences questions. Sport supplies an opportunity for exploring more qualitative questions as well. Consider the case of South African sprinter Oscar Pistorious who runs remarkably fast, perhaps too fast, on prosthetic legs. Should he be allowed to compete in the Olympics against other athletes? How is such a decision to be made? His circumstances raise important questions of fairness, equity, opportunity and, fundamentally, of the human condition. Such questions often are found at the intersection of technology and society. In the Tour de France bicycle race, a distinction between trying to gain advantage through blood doping, which is very much against the rules, versus sleeping in a portable hyperbaric chamber, which is allowed, is a useful analogy for thinking about the differences between, for instance, manipulation of genetic make-up of crops through selective breeding versus advanced biotechnology. The use of technologies in sport is governed by many of the same cultural, political, and technical considerations that govern the acceptance of technologies in society more broadly. Access to the full article is free, but requires you to register. Registration is simple and quick – all we need is your name and a valid e-mail address. We appreciate your interest in bridges. |
