Psychological momentum and sports "analogy?" research

I was watching Laois- Wexford in Croker yesterday and after a poor first half performance we (Laois) were trailing and needed a push to get back in the drivers seat. It was then that Joe Higgins blocked down an incoming forward catching the ball (pic is from the Longford match) in the process and passed it off to a huge roar from the crowd who were tethering on boredom up to that point. From then on it was happy days for Laois and we cruised to victory (no offence to any Wexford fans reading this!).

I started wondering was it possible that beliefs about the momentum of a team would influence how they play. It turns out there's been a bit of research realted to this, in sports and non-sports contexts and that people do perceive psychological momentum as an "extrapersonal force with which one is imbued until something causes one to lose it". Sports viewers would agree that when this momentum is lost it's difficult to get it back and that it's associated with feelings of frustration (again no offence to Wexford fans). Intrinsic to the idea of psychological momentum is the sensation of being on a roll or that the driving force of our mind is akin to the movement of a physical object. So ideas arise like that giving something more 'mass' will mean greater performance.

Keith Markman and colleagues found that akin to availability heuristics that participants conferred the team who had won their last match with greater psychological momentum and that local derby matches gave both teams more psychological momentum with a larger percieved 'mass'. Similarly, when participants were told a researcher was on a roll writing a research paper (I guess stick to what you know!) an interruption was thought of as more disruptive to her overall chances of completion than if she was working at a steady pace.

When we move forward towards a goal (or the goal) we feel a sense of exhilaration and when we are involved in the flow of an intrinsically rewarding task we feel frustration when our momentum is interrupted and this can be demotivating. When we feel we have momentum we can move easily to another task as there is a perception that this force carries over. Also research has shown that when we are confronted with uncertainty we are more likely to rely on perceptions of momentum to form our beliefs about what will happen.

So if we think about the typical situation of being on a roll in a gambling context then such naive beliefs may have detrimental effects in terms of letting a current state of psychological momentum impair your judgement in throwing good money after bad in a hand of poker or similarly trying to regain psychological momentum by playing irrationally (the momentum of the slippery slope perhaps!).

I was interested to read recently of a U-shaped curve in terms of time preferences of those living in Durban where those in very good or very bad health had high subjective discount rates. It may be pushing it to say that these people have a greater sense of psychological momentum or are chasing momentum respectively rather than the steady state individuals of middling health, but who knows. All I know is we'll need a hell of a lot of psychological momentum behind us to get over Dublin in 2 weeks time!