The gambler's fallacy and hot outcome: Cognitive biases or adaptive thinking for goalkeepers' decisions on dive direction during penalty shootout

In the face of uncertainty, human judgment and decision-making often tends to deviate from the realm of rationality. Gambler's fallacy and its opposite, hot outcome, are two such departures from laws of probability involving random streak of events. However, the adaptive thinking approach to decision-making proposes that any irrational heuristic or illogical belief can be fully adaptive as long as it fulfills the requirements of the decision task. During penalty shootouts in association football, goalkeepers face a series of multiple penalty kicks which are independent draws from a random process, and they need to anticipate the likely kick directions with limited time, insufficient information and computational capacity. The objective of this current study was to observe the goalkeepers in real-world competitive settings and examine whether they use gambler's fallacy and hot outcome as predictive strategies to decide on their dive directions during penalty shootouts following streaks of correct and incorrect predictions in the same direction. Another goal was to investigate from the adaptive thinking perspective whether such strategies lead to more correct predictions by the goalkeepers. Penalty shootout data were collected from the elite soccer tournaments over the course of last 25 years (1992 - 2016) and after applying appropriate exclusion criterions, 405 penalty kicks were considered for the final analysis. Binomial tests revealed that following progressively longer streaks of correct predictions in the same direction, goalkeepers became increasingly more likely to dive in the opposite direction for the subsequent kick than would be expected by chance, a behavior consistent with gambler's fallacy. However, neither gambler's fallacy nor hot outcome type patterns were observed when analyzing dives of goalkeepers following streaks of incorrect predictions in a particular direction. On the other hand, results of the Fisher's exact tests confirmed that both the fallacies failed to produce significantly more correct predictions from the goalkeepers and hence, they are mere fallacies. Goalkeepers' belief in gambler’s fallacy highlights the biases associated with their real-world decision-making as this study does not support the adaptive use of such deceptive beliefs as predictive decision strategies.