Though many believe that the officiating at this year’s World Cup was poor, researchers at Penn took a significant step in helping to explain why.
A recent study by Penn Medicine professors Alexander Kranjec, Anjan Chatterjee, Matthew Lehet and Bianca Bromberger revealed that soccer referees might subconsciously base their foul calls on the play’s direction.
Kranjec and his research team — all of Penn Medicine’s Neurology Department and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience — asked members of the Quakers’ men and women’s soccer squads to observe footage of various soccer plays and indicate if and when they saw a foul.
First, the researchers screened short clips of plays that moved from left to right. They then screened the mirror images of those clips, which moved from right to left.
The twelve players studied called about three more foul plays when viewing the action from right to left than when viewing the same action from the opposite direction, the study found.
Based on their findings, researchers concluded that soccer experts have a small, subconscious bias towards calling fouls when viewing an incident from right to left.
This tendency might arise from the fact that English-speakers are accustomed to reading left to right, so they are subconsciously biased against right-to-left action.
“When events move in the opposite direction they seem ‘less right,’” Kranjec wrote in an e-mail.
Kranjec added that moving forward, he hopes to conduct further research in order to clarify this explanation.
According to Kranjec, testing Arabic and/or Hebrew speakers in the future will allow Kranjec and his research team to make a more thorough assertion, as unlike English and other European speakers, both Arabic and Hebrew speakers read from right to left.
“There may be hard-wired reasons for this default preference for left-right directionality” among soccer experts, Kranjec explained, but expanding the study will allow him and his team to “make direct claims about the relation between reading direction and the effects we see.”
Kranjec also hopes to conduct the same study on soccer referees instead of soccer players.
Though Penn men’s soccer coach Rudy Fuller said he never thought about a bias among referees against left moving action, he found the investigation’s results “intriguing.”
He added that if — after further research, perhaps involving a larger population — Kranjec’s finding holds true, “it is certainly something various officials organizations would have to look into [dealing] with.”
However, he added, “I’m not even sure how you would train officials away from it … If you think about it, you learn to read in first grade, you’ve been doing it all your life, so how do you train yourself out of that?”
Fuller maintained that while the bias that Kranjec’s study has revealed is “fascinating” in depicting the way the brain subconsciously functions, it is unlikely to have a considerable impact on the sport.
“I don’t think there’s been a case where this [tendency] has impacted the game so greatly that working to change it would make a big difference,” he said. “We’re not going to coach or play any differently — it’s still the game of soccer.”
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