Contextual and dispositional influences on Netball Umpires' Decision Making

Abstract

Much of the sports officiating research literature has sought to understand environmental influences on officiating – most notably in soccer. The current body of work extends the existing literature, by investigating not only contextual influences on naturalistic decision making but also the influence of dispositional tendencies – specifically, umpires’ predisposition to deliberate and reflect on their decisions, i.e., their tendency to reinvest and ruminate. Performance analyses of an entire Netball Superleague season demonstrated that netball umpires’ decision making was influenced by several contextual factors, including crowd size and Decision Rumination. Reduced decision frequency – an avoidance-type behaviour – was associated with time elapsed, league position, crowd size, competition stage, and Decision Rumination. A lab-based investigation into the effects of crowd noise, a novel game management dual-task and pressure on decision making demonstrated that the intensity of the variables (under pressure, with crowd noise, with secondary task) reduced participants’ decision making accuracy. Reduced processing efficiency was indicated by increased scan ratios gaze on informative areas of the display, and an increase in mental effort under pressure and dual-task conditions. A reversion to novice-like thoughts, and fewer cognitive/top down sources of information were used to make decisions. Contrary to previous research, Decision Rumination was associated with better performance under these conditions. A final study sought to understand whether the impact of Decision Rumination on performance was context-specific by manipulating the feedback participants received during a lab-based video decision task. Following negative feedback, High Decision Ruminators were less confident and less accurate compared to Lower Ruminators. It is possible that whether trait Decision Rumination is debilitative or facilitative may be context-specific. The discrepancies and commonalities of the present findings in relation to the extant literature are discussed.