ABSTRACT
Imagine you are a soccer referee. Every weekend you are standing on the pitch and you are required to make hundreds of decisions within split seconds. Such decisions are made intuitively: instantly integrating many cues. Each of these decisions is not only observed and commented upon by tens of thousands of soccer fans, each one of your decisions may also influence the outcome of the game. Therefore, your decisions are partly responsible for the economic well-being of the competing clubs and one false decision can easily result in an undeserved loss of millions of Euros for the losing club. Additionally, fans, club officials and the media are going to criticize you rudely after most of your matches. Quite naturally, soccer referees as well as soccer clubs share an interest in training and improving referees’ decision making. One newly developed decision-making training device for soccer referees is the online training program SET1 (Brand, Schweizer, & Plessner, 2009; Plessner, Schweizer, Brand, & O’Hare, 2009). Referees are shown several short video sequences displaying critical incidents taken from real soccer matches and are asked to make a decision (e.g., foul or no foul) for each sequence. After indicating their decision, referees obtain feedback on the correctness of their decision.2
