Many fouls committed in football are ambiguous and there is no objective way to determine who the “true” perpetrator and who the “true” victim is. Consequently, when actual foul behaviour is not clearly observable, referees must rely on a variety of decision cues, i.e. other aspects that might be indicative of who truly committed the foul (cf. Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). In other words, when soccer passions are running high, supporters are likely to object to every foul decision against their team. But they might also have a point.
We set out to investigate such decisions in football to see whether people consider the available information in such situations in an unbiased way. Based upon evolutionary and embodiment research (Barsalou, 2008; Niedenthal et al., 2005), which has revealed that people associate the size of others with concepts such as aggression and dominance (e.g., Giessner & Schubert, 2007; Schubert, 2005), we assumed that people are biased, in that they are likely to attribute an ambiguous foul to the taller of two players.
To put our assumption to a test, we analysed all recorded fouls spanning the last seven seasons of UEFA Champions League (32,142 fouls), last seven seasons of German Bundesliga (85,262 fouls), the last three FIFA World Cups (6,440 fouls) as well as data from two additional perceptual experiments. For all seasons, leagues, and data collection methods, our analyses revealed the same picture: Taller people are more often held accountable for fouls than smaller ones – even if no actual foul was committed.
However, just based upon this field data we were unable to ultimately determine whether there is a systematic foul attribution bias against taller players or whether taller players in fact commit more fouls. That is why we conducted two additional perception experiments (with soccer fans) in which we showed two players of different height running towards a ball in the middle of the picture. Here, no actual foul was committed. Thus taller players could not actually foul more. We framed these pictures with stories (so called scenarios) and then asked about participants’ foul perceptions. The results clearly show that participants are more inclined to anticipate the taller player to foul the smaller one. Also, if we told them that the taller player would be laying on the ground after the portrayed scene, they post-hoc attributed it to chance or a dive, however, when we told them that the smaller player would lie on the ground, participants post-hoc attributed it to a foul by the taller player.
Hence given the field data and the experimental results, we can conclude that people, independent of the objective action that took place, have a tendency to attribute the foul to the taller of two players. However, it is not our call how our finding should impact football practice. Indeed, while our finding may bolster the case for using video replay to help soccer officials, we as soccer fans ourselves agree with FIFA president Sepp Blatter that such reviews would slow down the game and take away its human element. A better road to action thus might be to train referees accordingly so that they can consciously counter the height-bias (cf. Plessner et al., 2009).
In the end though, screaming your heart out at the referee is maybe just one part of the fun when watching the game – making the football experience much less anaemic than watching other sports.
Editors’ note: This article is based on Van Quaquebeke, N., & Giessner, S. R. (2010). ‘How embodied cognitions affect judgments: Height-related attribution bias in football foul calls’. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 32(1), 3–22.