Behavioral Sport Psychology

Description of the Strategy

Sport psychology's early years (1900–1960) were primarily concept or cognitive psychology oriented. The conceptual approach focused on discrete topics or the orientations of particular individuals and mainly explained phenomena in terms of theoretical constructs. Little, if any, information was devoted to describing practical procedures for coaches and athletes to follow to alter sport behavior/performance. Cognitive sport psychology was bent more on explanation and description than prescription. To a certain extent, it mirrored the thrust of motor learning, the mainstay of “psychology” in physical activity and education courses of study during that period. Explaining why behavior occurred was more popular than verifying how behavior occurred.

In the early 1960s, and particularly at the Rome Olympic Games, European nations were the sources of involving psychology in athletic arenas. Some good descriptive research on athlete behaviors was provided by practitioners, but their contributions were piecemeal. They did not attract coaches or athletes as being a source of valuable information for improving athletic performances.

B. F. Skinner's publications in the 1960s described a practical deterministic behavior system that attempted to account for all behaviors in all settings. It was labeled operant conditioning or, to a lesser degree, behavior modification, and popularly as Skinnerian Psychology. Today, it is frequently referred to as applied behavior analysis. It offered a system that embraced all facets of sporting environments, something that previously did not exist. In the early years, adherents in sport and physical education settings were labeled Skinnerians. The proposal of a complete system for behavior explanation was also an original contribution to those fields because it attempted to be useful in any circumstance. However, it had its detractors because it did not embrace the theoretical, but promoted the variables and procedures for altering behavior/performance. Since many psychologists were both schooled in and adherents of theoretical psychology, the attempt to promote Skinnerian psychology was met with resistance, probably because of the degree of threat it imposed to generally established psychology.

Operant psychology provided a system that contained tenets for explaining and altering all behavioral things. Its adventure into changing behavior fit with a sport model that deemed, “Coaches change athletes' behaviors so that they perform better.” This psychology offered a framework for telling coaches how to engage with athletes. It also described research paradigms that focused on single-subject or small-group experimentation and followed procedures that were well accepted in natural science. Sport is also very interested in individuals and small groups rather than populations. This was another attraction about operant psychology. This suggested a system of “applied psychology” that could be useful in sporting environments. In its development over the years, it has come to be termed behavioral sport psychology.

Research Basis

Behavioral sport psychology deems as largely unacceptable the postulations, assumptions, and procedures of many other forms of psychology. For the study of both covert and overt behaviors, the following are some unacceptable postulates: the phenomenological position, mind-body postulates, psychic expressions and manifestations, and the organocentric postulate.

Behavioral sport psychology limits itself to a series of metapostulates that dictate its investigations and applications. It is interested in data, not “factors/

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