Abstract
High-stakes team competitions can present a social dilemma in which participants must choose between concentrating on their personal performance and assisting teammates as a means of achieving group objectives. We find that despite the seemingly strong group incentive to win the NBA title, cooperative play actually diminishes during playoff games, negatively affecting team performance. Thus team cooperation decreases in the very high stakes contexts in which it is most important to perform well together. Highlighting the mixed incentives that underlie selfish play, personal scoring is rewarded with more lucrative future contracts, whereas assisting teammates to score is associated with reduced pay due to lost opportunities for personal scoring. A combination of misaligned incentives and psychological biases in performance evaluation bring out the “I” in “team” when cooperation is most critical.
Highlights
‘‘When you score a goal, or hit a three, or get a touchdown, you don’t do it for yourself, you do it for the team ’cause the name on the front of the shirt is more important than the one on the back.’’ – Herb Brooks, coach of the 1980 U.S Olympic hockey team
Professional sports teams represent a fascinating case of mixed incentives because teams complete fiercely for prestigious group honors, yet reward players financially based on evaluations of their individual performance
Despite the presence of the extraordinary opportunity to win the national title, we find that cooperative team play diminishes during National Basketball Association (NBA) playoff games
Summary
‘‘When you score a goal, or hit a three, or get a touchdown, you don’t do it for yourself, you do it for the team ’cause the name on the front of the shirt is more important than the one on the back.’’ – Herb Brooks, coach of the 1980 U.S Olympic hockey team. Formal incentives that reward group performance vary between games, and in many sports are especially strong during playoff games, which represent an opportunity to win the coveted league title This should by design lead to greater teamwork (i.e., increased backing-up behavior) as players seek to enhance their collective chances of winning a prize that for many represents a lifelong dream. Research on correspondent inferences demonstrates that social perceivers automatically attribute behavior to the agent’s underlying traits and fail to consider the role of the situation and surrounding context [15,16] One such often ignored contextual factor may be the team passing that set up a player to score. Psychological biases in evaluations of performance and the unintended consequences of group rewards may conspire to reduce team cooperation and success, ironically under those very conditions in which working together is most crucial
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