Action Bias: The Fallacy of "We Have to Do Something"

Why the most dangerous phrase in marketing is “we need to do something,” and what penalty shootouts teach us about the courage of inaction.

Every football fan has watched a goalkeeper fling themselves dramatically to one side during a penalty, only to see the ball roll gently into the opposite corner or straight down the middle. It looks like poor judgement, yet these are elite professionals with years of training and match footage at their disposal. The explanation lies not in a lack of skill, but in a well-documented psychological bias that affects decision-making under pressure, known as action bias.

The definitive research on this phenomenon came from Michael Bar-Eli and colleagues in their 2007 paper, “Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers: The Case of Penalty Kicks,” published in the Journal of Economic Psychology. The study has since become one of the most cited examples in behavioural economics for illustrating how professionals under scrutiny often choose to act, even when inaction would serve them better. [1]

What the Study Found

Bar-Eli’s team analysed 286 penalty kicks taken in top-level leagues and international matches, tracking exactly where the ball was struck and where the goalkeeper chose to dive. The numbers told a striking story. [2]

Kickers aimed for the centre of the goal 28.7% of the time. Goalkeepers stayed in the centre to face those shots on only 6.3% of occasions. Goalkeepers dived to the left or right 93.7% of the time, regardless of where the ball actually went. [3]

When the researchers calculated save probabilities for each strategy, staying in the centre produced a noticeably higher chance of a save than diving either way. In other words, the mathematically optimal strategy was to do less, not more, yet almost every goalkeeper in the sample ignored it. [2]

Let that sit for a moment. The best strategy was to stand still. And nearly every single goalkeeper chose to dive.

The Psychology Behind the Dive

The explanation Bar-Eli and his co-authors settled on draws heavily on norm theory, a framework developed by Daniel Kahneman and Dale Miller in 1986. Norm theory argues that people judge their own choices against an implicit standard of “normal” behaviour, and they feel far more regret when an abnormal choice leads to failure than when a normal one does. [4][5][6]

For a goalkeeper, the social norm is to dive. Standing still and watching the ball go in feels passive and exposes the keeper to harsher judgement from teammates, fans and pundits, even though the statistical outcome might be identical or better. Diving, even unsuccessfully, allows the goalkeeper to attribute the goal to the striker’s skill rather than their own inaction. This is the essence of action bias: a preference for doing something, anything, over doing nothing, driven by the anticipation of regret rather than by a cool assessment of the odds. [7][8][1]

This sits alongside a related concept called regret aversion, where people choose the option most likely to minimise future regret rather than the option most likely to produce the best outcome. Crucially, research on the “action-effect” has shown that regret following an abnormal action tends to feel sharper and more personal than regret following inaction, even when the practical consequences are identical. [6][9][4]

In plain English: if you dive and the ball goes the other way, that’s football. If you stand still and the ball rolls past you, that’s your fault. The outcome is the same, but the emotional weight is completely different.

Why We All Dive Sometimes

Action bias is not confined to football. Patt and Zeckhauser, who coined the term in 2000, identified the same pattern across multiple domains. [7]

In medicine, patients and doctors alike often favour active treatment over a “watch and wait” approach, even when clinical evidence does not support the intervention. A patient demanding antibiotics for a viral infection, or a surgeon recommending an operation when physiotherapy would produce equivalent outcomes, are both expressing the same bias. Doing something feels like care. Doing nothing feels like neglect, even when it’s the better clinical choice.

In investing, a nervous trader might sell or buy simply to feel in control of a volatile market. The portfolio that gets tinkered with constantly almost always underperforms the one that’s left alone, but leaving it alone feels irresponsible. Warren Buffett’s famous advice, “The stock market is a device for transferring money from the active to the patient,” is essentially a warning about action bias dressed up as investment wisdom.

In management, a leader under pressure will launch a new initiative rather than sit with an uncomfortable problem for a little longer. Restructuring teams, pivoting strategy, commissioning new research, these are the managerial equivalents of the goalkeeper’s dive. They feel decisive. They look like leadership. And they frequently make things worse. [10][1][7]

The bias tends to intensify under specific conditions: [1]

When others are watching and expect a visible response. The goalkeeper knows the cameras are on. The marketing director knows the board is watching the numbers.
When someone is overconfident in their own judgement. If you believe your instinct is reliable, you’re more likely to act on it without checking the data.
When a person has recently experienced a setback and feels compelled to “do something” to correct course. A bad quarter doesn’t just hurt the numbers; it hurts the ego. And a hurt ego wants to act.
When the situation is ambiguous, making any decisive action feel like progress even without evidence it will help. [10]

This last point is particularly relevant to marketing. Marketing is full of ambiguity. Campaign results are noisy. Attribution is imperfect. Competitor moves are unpredictable. And in that ambiguity, the temptation to act, to launch, to pivot, to rebrand, to “try something new,” becomes almost irresistible.

“We Have to Do Something”: The Marketing Industry’s Favourite Fallacy

If there’s one phrase that has destroyed more marketing value than any other, it’s some variation of “we have to do something.”

A competitor launches a new campaign. “We have to do something.” A quarter comes in soft. “We have to do something.” A new platform emerges. “We have to do something.” A negative story surfaces on social media. “We have to do something.”

The phrase sounds like urgency. It sounds like accountability. It sounds like leadership. But more often than not, it’s action bias wearing a suit.

Consider how this plays out in practice. A brand sees a competitor’s campaign generating attention. The instinct is to respond, to launch something of their own, to “join the conversation.” But the competitor’s campaign might be a one-off that burns bright and fades fast. It might be targeting a completely different audience. It might be underperforming internally despite looking impressive externally. None of that matters, because “we have to do something” doesn’t require analysis. It requires motion.

Or consider the quarterly review. Revenue is 3% below target. The room gets tense. Someone suggests a promotion. Someone else suggests repositioning. A third person suggests a new channel. Within weeks, the team is executing three new initiatives that nobody had planned, all triggered by a single data point that might have been noise. The original strategy, which was sound, gets abandoned not because it was wrong, but because nobody had the courage to say “let’s wait and see if this is a trend or a blip.”

The social media crisis is perhaps the most vivid example. A brand faces criticism online. The instinct is to respond immediately, to issue a statement, to show that “we’re taking this seriously.” But most social media crises burn out within 48 hours if left alone. The response, paradoxically, often extends the story by giving it a new peg: “Brand responds to backlash.” The act of doing something transforms a two-day story into a two-week one.

This is the goalkeeper’s dilemma in corporate form. Standing still while the ball is in the air feels like failure, even when the data says it’s your best option.

A Recent Challenge to the Original Findings

Interestingly, a 2026 replication study has begun to question whether the original action bias still holds among today’s elite goalkeepers. The newer data suggests that modern professionals, armed with far more detailed opposition analysis and sports science support, may no longer dive as compulsively as their counterparts did when Bar-Eli’s team gathered their sample. [11][12]

This does not undo the original finding so much as it highlights something important about behavioural biases generally: they are shaped by context, incentives and available information, and they can shift as those conditions change. The core psychological mechanism, namely the discomfort of visible inaction, remains just as relevant, even if elite football has since found ways to counteract it through better preparation. [12]

There’s a lesson here for marketers too. Action bias isn’t permanent. It can be managed. But only if you recognise it, build systems to counteract it, and create a culture where “let’s not do anything yet” is treated as a legitimate strategic position rather than an admission of failure.

How to Stop Diving When You Should Stand Still

Recognising action bias is the easy part. Overriding it is harder, because the social and emotional costs of inaction feel immediate, while the strategic benefits are diffuse and delayed.

Here are four practical approaches:

1. Separate the signal from the noise before acting. If a data point triggers the urge to respond, ask yourself: is this a trend or a single data point? One soft quarter is not a trend. One competitor campaign is not a market shift. One negative tweet is not a crisis. Give the data time to breathe before you commit resources to a response.

2. Make “do nothing” an explicit option in every decision. Most strategic discussions frame the choice as “which action do we take?” rather than “should we take action at all?” By explicitly including inaction as a candidate, you force the room to justify why acting is better than waiting. Often, it isn’t.

3. Assign a devil’s advocate. In the goalkeeper study, the social pressure to dive was overwhelming. In marketing meetings, the social pressure to “do something” is just as strong. Assigning someone the specific role of arguing against action removes the social cost of being the person who says “I don’t think we should do this.”

4. Measure the cost of your actions, not just their outcomes. Most marketing teams track campaign performance but not the opportunity cost of the campaigns they launched instead of waiting. If you rebrand and sales go up 2%, that looks like success. But if you’d done nothing and sales would have gone up 4% anyway, the rebrand was a net loss. You’ll never know unless you track the counterfactual.

The Wider Lesson

The goalkeeper study endures because it captures something universal about human decision-making under scrutiny. We are wired to prefer visible effort over quiet restraint, even when restraint is the smarter choice. Recognising action bias in yourself or your team is often the first step to overriding it, whether that means resisting the urge to launch a new campaign before the data supports it, or simply learning, as the best goalkeepers eventually do, that sometimes standing still is the boldest move of all. [13]

The next time someone in your team says “we have to do something,” pause. Ask what the data actually says. Ask what happens if you wait. Ask whether the urge to act is coming from evidence or from discomfort.

Because the most expensive words in marketing aren’t “we tried and failed.” They’re “we did something because we couldn’t bear to do nothing.”

Sometimes the best move is no move at all.

David Chadderton spent his twenties and thirties teaching people how to make life-or-death decisions at forty thousand feet. He now applies the same principles to consumer psychology, which, depending on the brief, can feel equally high-stakes. He’s the creator of the STAR Framework and the author of The STAR Framework: Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Engagement (NYC Big Book Award 2025), The STAR Operating System: Decode Mindset, Understand Motivation, Transform Human Behaviour, and Dear Algorithm, It’s Not Me, It’s You. By day, a Chief Marketing Officer. By night, a behavioural science obsessive who writes The Unoptimised Human because he can’t stop thinking about why people do what they do.

References

[1] Bar-Eli, M., Avugos, S. and Raab, M. (2008) ‘Twenty years of “hot hand” research: Review and critique’, Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 9(6), pp. 753-767.

[2] Bar-Eli, M., Leisterer, S. and Raab, M. (2007) ‘Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks’, Journal of Economic Psychology, 28(5), pp. 606-621.

[3] Bar-Eli, M. et al. (2007) Analysis of 286 penalty kicks in top-level leagues and international matches.

[4] Kahneman, D. and Miller, D.T. (1986) ‘Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives’, Psychological Review, 93(2), pp. 136-153.

[5] Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Allen Lane.

[6] Zeelenberg, M. and Pieters, R. (2007) ‘A theory of regret regulation 1.0’, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17(1), pp. 3-18.

[7] Patt, A. and Zeckhauser, R. (2000) ‘Action bias and environmental decisions’, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 21(1), pp. 45-72.

[8] Tykocinski, O.E. and Pittman, T.S. (1998) ‘The consequences of doing nothing: Inaction inertia as avoidance of anticipated counterfactual regret’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), pp. 607-616.

[9] Gilovich, T. and Medvec, V.H. (1995) ‘The experience of regret: What, when, and why’, Psychological Review, 102(2), pp. 379-395.

[10] Iyengar, S.S. and Lepper, M.R. (2000) ‘When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), pp. 995-1006.

[11] Raab, M. et al. (2026) ‘Revisiting action bias in elite penalty kick defence: A replication study’, Journal of Economic Psychology.

[12] Bar-Eli, M. (2026) ‘Commentary on the replication: Context, incentives and the evolution of decision-making under pressure’.

[13] Gilovich, T., Medvec, V.H. and Chen, S. (1995) ‘Commission, omission, and dissonance reduction: Coping with regret in the “Monty Hall” problem’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(2), pp. 182-190.