Amazingly, a friendly pat on the back of a basketball player can improve his or her performance, according to a research team at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
Büttner, who is a University of Basel visiting instructor from the University of Landau in Germany and Purdue University in Indiana studied precisely this situation using videos of basketball games. The study included a total of 60 games played by women’s basketball teams in the US National Collegiate Athletic Association. The games contained 835 incidents of two free throws.
How was the study conducted?
The researchers counted how many of her four teammates touched the shooter before a shot – for example, by tapping her on the shoulder or squeezing her hand. They then calculated whether there was a statistical association between the number of touches by teammates and the success rate of the subsequent shot.
The data showed that the chance of scoring rose when teammates showed their support through touch. The effect appeared only after a failed first shot, “so support from teammates is most helpful when your stress level is already high because you’ve missed the first of the two shots,” Büttner said.
