Team reasoning and collective rationality: piercing the veil of obviousness

The experiments reported in our target article provide strong evidence of collective utility maximization, and the findings suggest that team reasoning should now be included among the social value orientations used in cognitive and social psychology. Evidential decision theory offers a possible alternative explanation for our results but fails to predict intuitively compelling strategy choices in simple games with asymmetric team-reasoning outcomes. Although many of our experimental participants evidently used team reasoning, some appear to have ignored the other players' expected strategy choices and used lower-level, nonstrategic forms of reasoning. Standard payoff transformations cannot explain the experimental findings, nor team reasoning in general, without an unrealistic assumption that players invariably reason nonstrategically.     

How perceiving additional targets modifies teams’ tactical behavior during football small-sided games

This study aimed to measure how the change on targets information modifies teams’ tactical behavior during football small-sided games. 20 male senior professional players divided in 4 teams of 5 players participated in the study. Each team played two small-sided games, one with 2 official targets with goalkeeper and one with 6 small targets. Positional data of each player were recorded using a 15 Hz portable GPS. The distance between the centers of gravity (CG) of both team, the stretch index and the relative stretch index were measured and differences accessed via standardized differences, coefficient intervals and meta-analysis procedures. A moderate increase on the distance between the CG of each team and a small decrease on the stretch index and on the relative stretch index from 2 targets to the 6 targets games was observed. It was also identified that pitch location affected the interaction between teams. When the game was played in lateral corridors or defensive sectors, the differences between game conditions increased. Emphasizing the information for attacking team to shoot at goal, by manipulating the number of targets constrained tactical behavior of teams. The amplification of specific information on small-sided games can help coaches to promote players and teams’ emergent adapted behaviors.     

Simple mechanisms for gathering social information

Social contexts are notoriously complex, yet decisions are nevertheless made by using simple strategies. We argue that the concept of fast and frugal heuristics provides a promising framework for understanding how we gather social information to make decisions in social environments. That is, we assume that under limitations of time, energy, and computational resources people use cognitively based shortcuts that rely on information from social environments to solve different types of real problems. We review three successful applications of heuristics to the social arena. We first introduce some commonly faced social inference problems (e.g., selecting a mate or deciding whether to cooperate with someone) and then discuss how individuals can use simple strategies to solve such problems. For each problem, we consider how social environments are structured, and how we take advantage of this structure when using heuristics to make inferences and decisions.