Scientists explain a common fight in basketball: NPR

This happens all the time during basketball games. Two players go for the ball. They touch him at the same time but do not control him and he flies out of bounds.

At this point, spirits go up – both are certain that the other The player was the last to touch it, which should allow his own team to control the ball.

Do players claim to be so sure that their opponent is a victim? Or could there really be a difference in the way they live the experience that makes them point fingers to the other player?

These are the questions to which scientists from Arizona State University responded in an article published in Science Advances.

"It's very possible that people experience two different events, two different experiences of reality, even though they have experienced the same event," NPH Ty Tang, a PhD student in science, told NTP. cognitive at the ASU.

In the experiments, the researchers found that people tended to think that their own actions occurred before near simultaneous actions nearby. They found that on average, people perceive their own actions as occurring about 50 milliseconds before the other motion. That's why basketball players would be so convinced that they were tapping the ball before their opponent.

Tang says that in general, there is a lot of evidence that "sometimes things that some people experience are different from others."

To test this, Tang conducted three different experiments with ASU students. In the first experiment, two students were sitting one in front of each other. A separator between them had slots for the hands. When a simultaneous light flashed, each one tapped a sensor on the right hand of the other person, then indicated which of them thought they had typed first.

"We found a very strong effect for participants who think that their contact took place before that of the other person," Tang said.

It was not a race – we did not tell people to try to beat the other person. Yet, in more than two-thirds of the cases, the subjects in the study all said they were the first to exploit.

Tang achieved similar results by replacing the second human with a mechanical switch. In a third experiment, he used a click sound instead of a switch. "Even when we removed that contact and simply replaced it with a click, they still thought their contact had occurred before that sound," he says.

It is not clear why many people have this bias. Tang says it could support the theory that we "constantly foretell the world and try to create this mental model of what is going to happen". But they do not know if there really is a sensory difference between events in the brain, he says.

And it's worth noting that people do not do it always think their action took place first when two things happen almost simultaneously – it's just a big bias. Some people are more likely than others. And, he said, other factors are likely to play. For example, "if it's a competitive situation, you're probably more likely to make a decision that will be more favorable to you."

Which brings us back to the elite athletes. Are they more or less likely to have this bias towards their own actions?

"It's a little hard to say and it can go both ways," Tang says. Athletes have to constantly cope with these fast reaction times, so he wonders if this is a prejudice that can be eliminated. "If you have to make a distinction between all these near temporal events, they may be better able to tell which one has actually gone first or second," he says.

But on the other hand, athletes are constantly in a competitive situation – which, as he noted, can exacerbate prejudices.

In the end, however, "we just want people to better understand others' points of view," said Tang.

He adds, "Sometimes people have different experiences from what happened and they do not lie – they might actually have lived this way."