Citation

Furley P, Schweizer G. J. Sport Exerc. Psychol. 2016; 38(6): 590-597.

Affiliation

Department of Sport and Exercise Psychology, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Human Kinetics Publishers)

DOI

10.1123/jsep.2016-0192

PMID

28033036

Abstract

The goal of the present paper was to investigate whether soccer referees' nonverbal behavior (NVB) differed based on the difficulty of their decisions and whether perceivers could detect these systematic variations. On the one hand, communicating confidence via NVB is emphasized in referee training. On the other hand, it seems feasible from a theoretical point of view that particularly following relatively difficult decisions referees have problems controlling their NVB. We conducted three experiments in order to investigate into this question. Experiment 1 (N = 40) and Experiment 2 (N = 60) provided evidence that perceivers regard referees' NVB as less confident following ambiguous decisions as compared to following unambigous decisions. Experiment 3 (N = 58) suggested that perceivers were more likely to debate with the referee when referees nonverbally communicated less confidence. We discuss consequences for referee training.

Language: en