Leadership & Baseball

ACK!! John Smoltz blew a five run lead last night and the Braves lost. But, here's the quote from Manager Bobby Cox:

"He just got some pitches down the middle. Nothing is wrong with him. It's just location."

Given the Braves' record under Mr. Cox, one has to think that he may be on to some pretty sound management approaches to working with talent. From casual reading, it seems he attributes success to core qualities of the individuals involved and failure either to bad luck, external factors, or short term things that will correct themselves. Here, it's just that "He got some pitches down the middle." Not, "His location is bad." The first suggests that everyone's going to throw some pitches down the middle sometimes, Smoltzie happened to do it last night, and of course he'll be hitting his spots next time out. It's a matter of promoting an optimistic outlook.

I've mentioned the role of an optimistic attributional style before, and it has a specific application to sports. For those who might not want to scroll down to this part of my book note, I'm putting the notes on the chapter on sports from Learned Optimism in the cotinuation of this post.

Chapter Nine: Sports

This chapter was amazing for me, not least because it dealt with baseball. (Thank you, Tyler , for giving me in appreciation of this sport.) In 1985, Dr. Seligman and his team read all of the sports pages in the hometown papers of each National League team. They "CAVEd" every explanatory statement by every player and manager, then repeated the effort for 1986 -- about 15,000 pages of sports reporting. They found that teams with optimistic explanatory styles performed better under pressure (defined as hitting with runners in scoring position during the last three innings) in 1986 and finished with better records than their 1985 performance would have suggested.

Earlier, they had read all of the hometown sports pages for each team in the NBA Atlantic division for all of 1982 and 1983. Using the “spread" of the betting world as a method for compensating for differences in talent, they looked at how each team responded to adversity, defined as how they did against the spread in the game following a loss. Once again, explanatory style accounted for the differences.

Finally, in 1988, Dr. Seligman worked with the University of California Berkeley swim team to determine which swimmers responded best under adversity. In this case, adversity was defined as how they performed in their next event after a sub-par performance. Matt Biondi had one of the most optimistic explanatory styles. In the Summer Olympics in 1988 in Seoul , Korea , the media were talking of Biondi's chances of winning seven gold medals a la Mark Spitz in 1972. Knowledgeable observers, however, thought seven medals of any type against the competition in Seoul would be an accomplishment. Biondi took a disappointing bronze in the first event and, in an apparent mental error, coasted the last meter of the 100-meter buttyerfly (not his best event) and lost the gold by inches. The media buzzed with speculation as to how he would respond. Dr. Seligman was confident that, in accordance with his explanatory style, he would respond with top performances. Dr. Seligman was right. Biondi swept gold in the last five events!

Comments

[Dave Shearon]

Seligman had some material on whether certain cultures were more optimistic (tended to a more positive attributional style) than others. Interesting stuff.

[Chris C.]

Well, I don't know who's doing research on this area these days. There's a lot of stuff out there on "self-serving bias" in atribution theory, and group-serving bias is just an extension of that work. This was a hot topic in psychology in the 70's and 80's, but not so much any more.

Recently, there's been work by Markus & Kitayama and others on how the self-serving bias may be a cultural phenomenom; the bias is more evident in so-called individualistic societies (like the U.S.).

[Dave Shearon]

Thanks for the note, Chris. That's cool. I had wanted to ask you about your first post. Seligman's work is focused on individuals, not groups, so I'm not familiar with the mention of "group-serving bias". Any pointers? I'm going to deal with your point about schools and optimsim in another post.

[Chris]

John Smoltz was nominated by the Braves for the 2004 Branch Rickey Award. He has a very impressive Service resume. Perhaps this is part of what you are thinking of when you say that Mr. Cox "attributes success to core qualities of the individuals involved," especially the qualities of optimism and a willingness to improve situations.

[Chris C.]

"From casual reading, it seems he attributes success to core qualities of the individuals involved and failure either to bad luck, external factors, or short term things that will correct themselves."
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Attribution theorists in psychology call this the "group-serving bias"; most people prefer to attribute their own (or their group's) success to internal & stable factors while attributing failures to external & changeable factors. Obviously, people who experience failure won't respond as well to an internal & stable atirbution such as "You lack pitching ability", though this strategy is frequent in education (tracking, grading on achievement rather than progress, etc).