Bouncing back together: Social post-error adaptations in basketball

Error monitoring is a crucial aspect of behavioral regulation which has been studied extensively in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Lab studies often observe increased caution following own and others’ errors. Moreover, social error monitoring research suggests that cooperation and shared goals elicit stronger adaptations to others’ errors than competition. However, these insights primarily stem from controlled reaction time tasks, potentially limiting their generalization to real-world social contexts. To address this, we studied social post-error adaptations in competitive basketball by analyzing data from four NBA seasons. Our meta-analyses revealed increased caution in terms of shot distance and angle following missed compared to made shots. Increased caution was most pronounced after one’s own errors but was also observed after teammates' and opponents' errors. While controlling for rebounds reduced the effects following own and teammates’ errors, the general pattern remained. Additionally, we found a positive correlation between post-error caution and post-error accuracy, underscoring the adaptive nature of this cautious response. Importantly, our results also revealed a positive correlation between adaptations following own and teammates' errors, contrasting with a negative correlation with adaptations following opponents’ errors. This suggests that the effects following own and teammates’ errors may partially be driven by similar processes, while different mechanisms may be involved following opponents’ errors. These findings not only extend cognitive theories from controlled lab settings to a real-word sport setting, but also provide a crucial understanding of athletes' social error responses thereby paving the way for research aimed at optimizing performance.