Pop quiz: It's halftime during the NCAA
championship game. The buzzer sounds, and the team you've picked to go all the
way is a point down. Who's going to win?
Don't be shocked if your players come
back to win the game. Odds are, that's what they'll do.
A recent study by two business professors
at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania looked at more than
6,000 college basketball games and found that teams that are just slightly
behind at halftime are more likely to win the game.
It may sound strange to say you should be
glad to see your team trailing at the half. But understanding why is key to
understanding all kinds of human motivation, in areas from classroom achievement
to corporate competitiveness.
Jonah Berger, a coauthor of the study,
titled "When Losing Leads to Winning," said the idea arose from something that
intrigued him while coaching youth soccer: he "always felt like the kids worked
harder when we were slightly behind at halftime." Along with Wharton colleague
Devin Pope, Berger crunched the numbers on basketball games and found that teams
trailing by one point at the half went on to win 51.3 percent of the
time.
To be certain they weren't just seeing an
effect peculiar to basketball, Berger and Pope devised a lab test. They gave
subjects a timed button-pushing task and told them they were playing against a
hidden competitor. Halfway through, they paused and told the participants they
were either far behind, slightly behind, tied, or slightly ahead. Subjects who
believed they had only a small gap to close showed greater effort once they
returned to the task. The other groups didn't show the same burst of
energy.
This kind of drive will sound familiar to
anyone racing to finish a report faster than a cubicle mate, receiving a test
score just points behind a lab partner, or trailing a road race competitor by
just a few dozen steps. Other studies have shown that having a clear but
reachable goal is a powerful motivating force.
But not everyone wins when they're just a
touch behind. What separates the teams that overcame the halftime gap from the
ones that didn't? In their final test, Berger and Pope again told subjects how
they were performing relative to competitors, but also polled them on how they
felt about their ability to succeed. Those with higher confidence tried harder
to overcome the deficit. Their belief in their own abilities, it emerged,
determined the level of response to their "halftime" feedback.
This phenomenon is known to psychologists
as "self-efficacy," the confidence that you not only can, but must, get
something done despite obstacles or outside influences.
"If you have that resiliency, then being
behind can act as a motivator and a focus," said Deborah L. Feltz, a professor
at Michigan State University and coauthor of the book "Self-Efficacy in Sport."
But if you lack this inherent feeling, "then you're really going to beat
yourself before you've even stepped on the floor."
In success psychology, it's still an open
question whether that self-assurance needs to be merited, or if it can be
created on the spot. Sandra Short, a psychologist at the University of North
Dakota and a coauthor of "Self-Efficacy in Sport" with Feltz, is doing research
on a new theory that convincing yourself you're confident is just as powerful as
actually being confident. And Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist, has
written that self-efficacy can be increased by verbal persuasion - hence the
halftime pep talk. Bandura determined that people who are verbally persuaded
"are more likely to mobilize greater effort and sustain it" than if they lack
reinforcement and dwell on what they're doing wrong.
"I always talk to myself on the court,
especially if I'm struggling," says Siena College senior Kenny Hasbrouck, whose
team was down by five points at halftime during its first-round game but came
back to beat Ohio State in overtime. "I tell myself to forget about a turnover,
forget about a shot, [and] box out my man."
So, assuming you've got the confidence in
your own abilities, should you actually strive to be a bit behind? The technique
is often used in head-to-head sports, where a marathoner or bike racer might
stay strategically shy of a competitor while saving up the energy for a winning
push. But for sports where you need to score repeatedly to win, there are
dangers to relying on the numbers on the board.
Adam Naylor, a sports psychologist at
Boston University, says that teams risk overconfidence if they see themselves
ahead, or deflation if they see themselves too far behind. Even if the numbers
show it's helpful to be just a touch behind, he says, there are limits to how
literally that insight should be applied.
"You don't want to tell your coach to
make sure you're losing at halftime," Naylor said. "I'd lose every job I had if
I told that to a coach."
