Judges’ decisions in sport focus more on vigour than skill

Dr Sarah Lane, Post-doctoral Research Fellow and the study’s lead author, said:

“MMA is a fast paced sport and one of the suggestions from our research would be that judges may find vigour easier to assess than skill. That, in turn, leads them to overvalue it when making their decisions especially in longer fights where one fighter tires more quickly and the disparity in vigour is easier to spot.

"The advance of technology such as instant replays could potentially counter this, but until they are employed more regularly rate of attack is likely to remain the most important performance trait for victory by decision.”

Mark Briffa, Professor of Animal Behaviour and co-author of the study, added:

“Human combat sports provide a unique scenario in which to explore how performance traits such as skill and vigour are perceived, both by participants and observers. However, because of the obvious communication issues, very little is known about the accuracy with which fighting animals more widely judge the abilities of their rivals. What we do know is that bystanders often observe and evaluate fighters’ performances in order to choose future mating partners or learn which rivals to avoid. That would suggest the human use of performance traits to evaluate fighting ability as seen in this study is being replicated elsewhere in the animal kingdom, and this is something we are continuing to explore through our work.”