Response requirements affect offside judgments in football (soccer)

Judging offside in football represents a typical go–nogo task (offside—raising the flag, no offside—no response). Nevertheless, several studies involved two-choice tasks (e.g. offside—press key A, no offside—press key B) to investigate potential sources of errors in offside situations. While go–nogo and choice–response tasks are commonly used in experimental psychology, response preferences may differ between the two tasks. Therefore, we investigated the impact of response requirements on offside judgments in a sample of male participants without experience in professional refereeing. Each participant judged displays of potential offside situations in a go–nogo condition and in a two-choice condition. The results show that response requirements affected the response bias of the participants and suggest that go–nogo requirements increase the preference for the positive response (i.e. the offside response) as compared to the two-choice task. We discuss both methodological and theoretical implications of this finding.