When the team is losing and the time comes for penalties, soccer goalkeepers tend to move to the right , according to a curious study published in the journal Psychological Science .
Marieke Roskes and her colleagues at the University of Amsterdam came to this conclusion after studying the penalty shootouts in all the matches of the 1982-2010 Soccer World Championships. And they found that in the event of a tie, goalkeepers had the same probability of go left or right to defend the goal. However, when they are behind on the scoreboard, that is, under the pressure of a losing position, they unconsciously jump further to the right .
After analyzing the soccer images, the team of researchers continued their studies in the laboratory, asking a series of subjects to divide a line in half. Thus, they found that those who were thinking about a positive goal and were subjected to a certain pressure, forced to react quickly, tended to divide the line further to the right, the same predisposition observed in the "beautiful game" goalkeepers.
Previous studies show that people and animals instinctively tend to move to the right when they want to get something , affecting even the side on which frogs catch their prey.
