ABSTRACT
Referees 1 are involved in most competitive sports; moreover, in some sports, the assessment of athletes’ performance depends exclusively on human judgments. The tasks of referees vary from simple judgments to complex decisions. Many of these tasks surpass the limited human capacity to process information (e.g., Salmela, 1978). For example, given the speed of the modern tennis game, the human perceptual system does not allow for differentiating between a ball that is on the line and one close to it (Jendrusch, 2002). It lacks the appropriate temporal resolution. However, decisions have to be made by referees even when situations are ambiguous or unclear, or when important information is missing due to personal or situational factors. Such situations seem to occur quite often in sport competitions. For example, in a recent study on the influence of crowd noise on referee decision in soccer, Nevill, Balmer, and Williams (2002) asked referees to make assessments for 47 typical incidents taken from an English Premier League match. One of the findings was that none of these challenges resulted in a unanimous decision by all qualified referees participating in the study (see also Rainey, Larsen, Stephenson, & Coursey, 1989). Additionally, referees not only have to make decisions about situations, but also have to evaluate the performance of other people, and there is always some interaction between referees and the athletes involved. Consequently, it has been argued that refereeing in sports follows general principles of social judgment, and therefore referees tend to make systematic judgment biases based on cognitive processing like all people in social judgment situations (Plessner & Raab, 1999).
