Abstract
The influence of a potentially fouled player's vocalisations on the referee's decisions was investigated. Experienced soccer referees watched video clips of real-match situations that were presented either without sound or with sound where a player's vocalisations were clearly audible and made judgements regarding fouls, direction of play and personal penalties. The results revealed that players’ vocalisations had no impact on the foul decisions of the referees. However, once a referee made a foul decision, the player's vocalisations led to an increased number of personal penalties (increase in yellow cards) for the foul-causing player. In addition to crowd noise, a player's vocalisations during a foul are used as a proximal cue in the referee's decision-making process.
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Acknowledgements
All authors contributed in the following manner to the development of this paper. HL and AP conceived of and designed the experiment. MK and HL performed the experiments. HL and MK analyzed the data. MK and TS contributed materials/analysis tools. The paper was written by AP and HL. Many thanks to Anita Todd for her English editing.