Not Even Professional Golfers Are Immune From This Cognitive Bias

What’s the best way to make a golf course easier? By making it harder, according to new research published in the Journal of Sports Economics.

A team of scientists led by Ryan Elmore of the University of Denver found that changing a golf hole from a ‘par 5’ to a ‘par 4’ without changing any of the physical characteristics of hole caused professional golfers perform better in tournament competition.

There’s only one logical explanation for this, according to the researchers: loss aversion.

“Loss aversion states that people tend to value something they already have at above the level that others would value it,” state the researchers. “In sports, there are many famous examples of coaches and players exhibiting loss-averse behavior. This would include coaches using non-optimal kicking strategies in American football, teams playing for a draw instead of a win in soccer, and baseball team construction.”

To test their theory in the context of professional golf, the researchers examined data from two famous golf venues, Pebble Beach Golf Links in Pebble Beach, California and Oakmont Country Club in Plum, Pennsylvania. It just so happened that both of these venues hosted multiple U.S. Open championships between the years of 1992 and 2007. Not only that, but both courses re-labeled one hole from a par 5 to a par 4, without changing any of its other characteristics, between tournaments.

This created a near perfect natural experiment for the researchers to test the effect of this ‘reference point’ change on player performance. They hypothesized that golfers’ scores on the changed holes would improve due to their increased desire to maintain a neutral (par) score — a sentiment reflected in a 2007 interview with Tiger Woods, where he commented, “You don’t ever want to drop a shot. The psychological difference between dropping a shot and making a birdie, I just think it’s bigger to make a par putt.”

This is exactly what the researchers found. In the 1992 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, the average score on hole number 2 — then a par 5 — was approximately 4.65. During the 2000 U.S. Open, when hole number 2 had been re-labeled from a par 5 to a par 4, the average score was approximately 4.40.

“We estimate the loss aversion effect size on hole number two at Pebble Beach is between 0.13 and 0.32 strokes at the 95% significance level,” state the researchers. “In other words, this analysis shows that a professional golfer will score (on average) between 0.13 and 0.32 strokes lower when hole two plays as a par four relative to when it plays as a par five.”

The same pattern of results emerged at the 1994 and 2007 U.S. Opens at Oakmont, where hole number 9 was changed from a par 5 to a par 4.

One alternative explanation for these results is that golfers have gotten better over time due to advancements in training, diet, club and ball technology, etc. While this might explain some of the observed improvement, it fails to tell the whole story. If this were the case, one would expect scores on all holes to improve from one tournament to the next, something the authors did not find.

They state, “As we have shown, there is a decrease in average scoring on holes number two at Pebble Beach and number nine at Oakmont that is markedly different from any changes on the other seventeen holes on each course. No hole on either course shows a consistent decrease in scoring average after the changes were implemented when they kept a consistent par rating and, in fact, several holes played harder. We would expect a similar decrease over all holes if the results were simply due to better golfing technology.”

Most importantly, this research quells a common criticism of behavioral economics, which is that many of its findings lack applicability in the real world.

Not only do they matter, they matter at the highest levels of competition.