Deceptive actions in sports are deliberately performed
in order to hinder the (re-)action of the opponent.
They are conducted most often in one-on-one
interaction scenarios between two opponents (e.g., in
boxing), but can also be observed during tactical play
of groups and teams (e.g., in American Football).
Jackson, Warren, and Abernethy (2006) differentiated
between two different strategies: On one hand, an athlete
can try to disguise the true action intention by minimizing
all movement cues that could be used by the
opponent to recognize the forthcoming action. An
attacking volleyball player, e.g., might try to hide
whether he/she wants to smash or lob the ball across
the net as long as possible. The challenge for the
opponent is to infer the true action intention based on
the reduced information available. On the other hand,
an athlete can provide misleading information in order
to generate an inappropriate (re-)action by the opponent.
A popular example is the head fake in basketball,
when, e.g., a basketball player looks to the left while
passing the ball to the right. The challenge for the
opponent here is to focus on the action-relevant information
(i.e., pass direction) and to ignore the actionirrelevant
information (i.e., gaze direction). The motivation
for novices and expert athletes to use either of the
two strategies is that providing little information or
invalid information about one’s own action intention
will increase the chance of outperforming the opponent
(for an overview, see Gu¨ldenpenning, Kunde, &
Weigelt, 2017).
Importantly, deceptive actions as described here represent
a form of ‘legal’ behavior, which takes place
within the constitutive rules of the sport. They need to
be distinguished from any form of ‘illegal’ conduct, as,
e.g., the use of doping for performance enhancement,
or financial manipulation and game fixing. In contrast
to such ‘illegal’ behavior, deceptive actions are wellaccepted
in training and competition, and are therefore
widely-used in nearly all interactive sports. The skillful
use of deceptive actions by athletes is sometimes even
recognized as a signification of their creativity and high
expertise.
