The usefulness of the useless: How ritualized behavior improves self-control under competition pressure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pre-match ritualized behavior have long been a topic of study in applied sport psychology. However, most of the above studies focus on pre-established rituals that make it difficult to explore the clear causal relationship of the ritualized behavior, particularly its underlying mechanisms. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of athletes’ ritualized behavior on self-control under competition pressure. One hundred and forty-six college athletes were recruited. This study used a two-factor between design 2 (competition pressure: low vs. high) × 3 (behavior type: ritualized behavior vs. random behavior vs. control group). Based on the Shooter-type Go/No-go task, the dependent variable was the average number of loops and the error rates of 10-meter air pistol task in virtual reality. We found that ritualized behavior had a moderate impact on the average number of loops [F(1, 140) = 5.13, p = .007, ηp2 = 0.068] and error rates [F(2, 140) = 11.29, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.139], and it was more beneficial for error rate under competition pressure [F(2, 140) = 3.18, p = .045, ηp2 = 0.043], while the symbolic meaning of ritualized behavior promotes self-control by improving self-efficacy and autonomous motivation via a top-down processing system. The psychological feature of ritualized behavior may serve as an important explanatory mechanism for its enhancing effect on self-control under competition pressure. This study supports and integrates the Precaution Theory and Self-determination Theory. In the future, researchers can design unique ritualized behaviors based on embodied cognition to help athletes in different sports groups.Lay Summary: In the arena, the audience cannot only see the athletes’ wonderful sports movements, but also, all kinds of ritualized behaviors. Through engaging in ritualized behavior as a “pregame booster”, athletes can improve self-control on shooting performance. Compared with the low-pressure situation, ritualized behavior was more beneficial for self-control under high competition pressure situations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".