Year of ideas

December 18, 2008 - 8:57 AM by David

The future to our economic woes - the penalty kick

We all know that Israelis are full of ingenuity (along with some other other qualities). But it’s gratifying to see that the rest of the world recognizes some of the innovations coming out of our tiny corner of the world.

The New York Times Magazine has published its ‘Year in Ideas’ for 2008 - an alphabetic listing of some of the most riveting developments in the fields of research, science and technology -”and deemed fit to include at least two ideas borne from the Sabra kopf.

The first accomplishment is the first-ever forensic dog-poop DNA unit being used in Petah Tikva to identify which dogs are pooping on the streets and which owners are to blame. Harry wrote all about it here on Israelity, out-pooping.. er, out-scooping the Times by three months.

The second shout out to Israeli research derives from our oasis in the south – Ben-Gurion University of Negev – where researchers from the Guilford Glazer School of Business and Management published a paper titled, “Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers: The Case of Penalty Kicks,” in the Journal of Economic Psychology earlier this year.

According to the researchers, and the Times, the BGU team may have some prescient advice for these tough economic times. Under the heading of “G” for “Goalkeeper Science,” the Times highlighted the work which analyzed 286 penalty kicks and found that 94 percent of the time the goalies dived to the right or the left – even though the chances of stopping the ball were highest when the goalie stayed in the center.

“Judgment and decision-making are very important for the understanding of economies, governments and businesses. Because decision-making processes in different contexts often share the same characteristics and biases, we can sometimes examine behavior is sports (where it is relatively easy to observe and where players have huge incentives to make the right choices) and learn from it about human behavior and decision-making more generally,” the researchers explained.

The Times remarked on the academics’ finding that suggests that goalies prefer to “show that they’re doing something,” rather than to appear passive, and quoted lead BGU author Prof. Michael Bar-Eli as he noted that “during periods of economic turmoil, C.E.O.’s might be tempted to change their corporate strategy, or investment managers to juggle their portfolios, even when staying put is the wisest course”.

Or maybe the optimal advice to be gleaned from the research is that we all should head out to the soccer field and practice our penalty kicks.

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