Abstract
The generalized matching law was used to evaluate play selection (passing versus rushing) in professional football game situations defined by combinations of football-specific factors. Archival statistics were analyzed to determine whether play selection covaried with yards gained from passing and rushing plays, and whether the details of this relationship, as measured by the matching law's fitted parameters, varied systematically across game situations. The matching law accounted for substantial variance in play selection for several combinations of game situations, and statistically significant situation-interaction effects were found for bias, but not sensitivity. Follow up analyses revealed that, across game situations, play-selection bias effects were closely related to relative probability of a turnover (can be described in terms of punishment) and the relative yards-gained variance (which can be described in terms of variable-magnitude reinforcement schedules). These results bolster an operant-choice interpretation of football play selection; they reveal two separate aspects of play preference (generic matching versus bias); and provide a rare example of how face-valid effects in a domain of everyday interest may relate to a theoretically-important term of a laboratory-based quantitative model of choice.
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Notes
A common critique of field extensions of the GML concerns this very issue of parallels in contingencies. For a variety of reasons related to convenience in behavior measurement, laboratory studies of choice tend to employ concurrent variable-interval reinforcement schedules. Critiques of field extensions often focus on the fact that everyday contingencies are unlikely to be "pure" variable interval schedules. For example, reinforcers inherent in contingencies of sports like football may have ratio-like properties. It is widely thought that matching does not occur in concurrent ratio schedules. According to this line of reasoning, effects like those described in the present article, although well described by the GML, must be spurious because they result from contingencies that cannot support matching. Our response is to acknowledge that sport contingencies probably have both interval and ratio properties, and to point to numerous laboratory experiments showing that matching models do a good job of accounting for choice under hybrid ratio-interval contingencies (Green et al. 1983; LaBounty and Reynolds 1973; Savastano and Fantino 1994; Shurtleff and Silberberg 1990). The fact that no existing laboratory experiment has arranged contingencies exactly like those in most field settings leaves room for debate about the generality of laboratory results, and we would like to see more laboratory experiments devised specifically to examine the effects of contingencies as they operate in the field.
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Author Note
For assistance with data collection we thank Brittney Augello and Kelsey Zulz. Address correspondence to T. Critchfield, Psychology Department, Campus Box 4620, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790. Electronic mail: tscritc@ilstu.edu.
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Critchfield, T.S., Meeks, E. & Stilling, S.T. Explanatory Flexibility of the Matching Law: Situational Bias Interactions in Football Play Selection. Psychol Rec 64, 371–380 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-014-0064-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-014-0064-5