The Impact of Learned Behaviors in the Art of Shooting Penalties

Abstract

This paper is a thought experiment that attempts to find tentative explanations, from a behavioral perspective, for what happened with the Peruvian soccer player, Christian Cueva, and why he didn’t participate in the penalty shootout that deprived the Peruvian team from the opportunity to be part of the 2022 Qatar World Cup. The paper analyzes widely known principles of learning such as classical and operant conditioning, and how its subsequent phenomena, like one-trial learning and extinction, can be applied to elite sports players. Memory will also play an important role since renewal effect and reinstatement can explain how retrieval failure influences and determines behavior due to exposition to certain environments or specific visual cues. Lastly, the paper explores what motivates a person to get involved in a highly stressful activity like shooting a transcendental penalty, and how operant conditioning can provide a powerful explanation to specific behaviors that could be perceived as aversive by the public. Understanding how we acquire knowledge through association, and how this new information influences our behavior, could make a huge difference when we are in leadership positions and our performance dictates the outcome of a goal that took us years of hard work; and in a developing society, such as Peru, resistant to accept the influence of psychology phenomena in sports like soccer, this type of work finds meaning as a cultural and academic contribution to the field of psychology.