Why That Call Looked So Bad (and Probably Wasn’t)

Come on, ref! That was clearly a foul!! Or, later in the game, there’s no WAY that was offsides!!

We’ve all heard parents yelling from the sidelines. Or perhaps we’ve even been one of those parents.

It’s great that our club has asked us all to participate in The Sidelines Project as a way to think more carefully about how we carry ourselves at games. If you haven’t watched the short video yet, do it—it will really help you and your player enjoy the game more and improve. But in this entry, I want to offer a little more to think about as you're sitting there, keeping your thoughts to yourself.

As a linguist who studies the relationship between language and thought, I’ve become interested not only in how we sound as parents on the sidelines, but in how there’s actually something deeper going on at the perceptual level. Two weeks ago, as our 2009s were getting ready to play in the final for a tournament they ended up winning (yay) I watched a few minutes of the consolation round. I wasn’t personally invested in the match, and to me, the calls seemed reasonable. I saw a couple of fouls on both sides, a few calls of advantage, a few rough plays that looked like they were all ball. It appeared to me that the refs were doing solid work.

But parents on either side of the game were getting outraged—and it was happening along predictable lines. Parents were upset when calls went against their team, or when they perceived fouls against their team that didn’t get called. I never once saw anyone upset that a foul call went in their team’s favor.

Have you taken a sideline course?

• Yes
• No
• What's that?

All of this seems fairly obvious, but what is actually going on?

It turns out there's quite a bit of research in cognitive psychology to support a phenomenon that has a few names—partisan perception, ingroup bias, hostile attribution bias, naïve realism, self-serving bias, and motivated reasoning are all part of this broader family. The literature goes back pretty far. In a now-famous paper from 1954, researchers showed Princeton and Dartmouth students a film of a rough football game between their schools. Predictably, the Princeton students noticed mostly Dartmouth’s infractions, and the Dartmouth students mostly saw Princeton’s. The numbers weren’t even close: Princeton students saw nearly twice as many infractions by Dartmouth as by Princeton. Dartmouth students saw the two teams as committing about the same number.

The paper—called “They Saw a Game”—was ironically titled. The authors argued that this wasn’t just bias or selective memory; it was a kind of group cognition that shaped what people perceived in the first place. People weren’t merely disagreeing about how to interpret what they saw. They were, in a very real sense, watching different games.

Keep this in mind when you’re on the sidelines. Yes: as The Sidelines Project rightly argues, your player will enjoy the game more and play better if you keep your voice down and your thoughts to yourself. But it’s also worth knowing, as you sit there biting your lip, that your brain may be skewing your experience in completely predictable ways.

That insight has helped me not only stay quiet—but feel better as I do so.

Let the ref, who doesn’t have a dog in the fight, do their job. Give them the benefit of the doubt.