Superstitions Behavior and Decision Making in Collegiate Athletes: An Illogical Phenomenon

Baljinder Singh Bal, Davinder Singh, Kulroop Kaur Badwal, Gurmej Singh Dhaliwal

Department of Physical Education & Sports, National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar, India.
Department of Physical Education (T), Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India.
Department of Sports Medicine & Physiotherapy, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India.

DOI: 10.4236/ape.2014.41001                

Abstract

This study examined the superstitious behavior and decision making among individual, dual and team sport groups. To obtain required data, the investigators had selected Ninety (N = 90) male intercollege level athletes of 19 to 25 years of age to act as subjects. They were divided into three groups; Thirty (n₁ = 30) Individual Sports, Thirty (n₂ = 30) Dual Sports and Thirty (n₃ = 30) Team Sports athletes of various games and sport. The purposive sampling technique was used to select the subjects. All the subjects, after having been informed about the objective and protocol of the study, gave their consent and volunteered to participate in this study. To measure the level of superstitions behaviors of the subjects, the superstitions beliefs and behaviour scale constructed by Buhramann et al. (2004) was administered and to measure the level of decision making by applying decision making questionnaire prepared by French et al. (1993). One way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was employed to find out the intra-group differences. To test the hypothesis, the level of significance was set at .05. The results revealed significant intra-group differences among individual, dual and team sports on the variable superstitious behavior and decision making. It is concluded that the individual sport group has low superstitious belief and better decision making level as compared to their counterpart dual and team sport.

Keywords

Superstitious; Behavior; Decision Making

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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