MILITARY PSYCHOLOGY, 20:(Suppl.

1)S147–S153, 2008
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0899-5605 print / 1532-7876 online
DOI: 10.1080/08995600701804897

Psychology in Sports and the Military:

Building Understanding and
Collaboration Across Disciplines
Gerald F. Goodwin
U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences,
Arlington, Virginia

The goal of this special issue was to identify how the underlying theoretical issues
studied in sports psychology might inform research conducted by military psycholo-
gists. In the interest of providing the basis for further discussion between these two
fields, this commentary highlights several areas discussed in the preceding articles
which may inform military research in the behavioral sciences. Further, suggestions
are offered for both fields that may lead to additional collaborative opportunities. The
recommendations and comments offered cover the domains of expertise develop-
ment, simulation and training, and team effectiveness among others.</AB>

This special issue strives to provide the means for cross-disciplinary discussion be-
tween sports psychology and military psychology. That these two disciplines
should have common and collaborative interests seems intuitive given the com-
monalities in task and environmental characteristics. Many sports, particularly
those practiced in the Olympic Games, have evolved from some of the basic tasks
of the military over the centuries. The most evident of these derive from fundamen-
tal aspects of warfare such as marksmanship (e.g., rifle, pistol, archery), over-
coming physical defenses and obstacles (e.g., pole vault, high jump, long jump,
steeplechase), and hand-to-hand combat (e.g., wrestling, judo, boxing). Combat
operations have evolved from a focus on major formations to small units (e.g., pla-
toons, squads), which have some similarities to the structures of modern era team
sports (e.g., hockey, football). However, one notable difference between these two

Correspondence should be addressed to Gerald F. Goodwin, U.S. Army Research Institute, 2511
Jefferson Davis Hwy, Arlington, VA 22202. E-mail: Jay.goodwin@hqda.army.mil
S148 GOODWIN

domains that must be acknowledged is that, unlike athletes of today, soldiers are
required to develop and maintain a high level of performance across a wide variety
of tasks and be able to perform them under conditions of extreme stress. For exam-
ple, marksmanship competitors do perform a task with which many soldiers, par-
ticularly snipers, must maintain proficiency. However, these athletes do not have to
be concerned that their targets might shoot back, worry about attacks from other
directions, or deal with the psychological impact of taking the life of another hu-
man being.
I have been asked to provide a commentary on the articles of this special issue
as a psychologist working for the military. Although one could point out the obvi-
ous issue of differences in tasks, performance conditions, and other factors, the
goal of this special issue was to identify how the underlying theoretical issues stud-
ied in sports psychology might inform research conducted by military psycholo-
gists. As such, I offer recommendations for researchers of sport and the military
both that may help us learn from each other and lead to greater opportunities for
collaborative research across our disciplines. As an applied researcher it is often
easy to dismiss basic research efforts as being conducted with irrelevant popula-
tions, in contrived and artificial contexts, and with irrelevant tasks. As a basic re-
searcher it is similarly easy to dismiss applied research as methodologically lack-
ing rigor and failing to measure what should ideally be measured. There is logic to
both of these positions; however, through collaboration and a focus on developing
creative solutions we can address some of the shortcomings of each of these as-
pects of research. As a source of potential collaboration for military researchers,
sport psychologists offer a particularly attractive option as their discipline is ulti-
mately focused on understanding and addressing problems in live performance
contexts—sports activities. There remain differences to be overcome, but this is a
critical first step.
The authors contributing to this special issue have described lines of research
that have potential to significantly contribute to research supporting the military.
Of particular note are methods for understanding the development of expertise and
understanding the impact of stress on performance. However, there are several rec-
ommendations for researchers in sports psychology that I will offer as potential
modifications to their approach that would make their findings more relevant to the
military context. These recommendations focus on task granularity, strategic
skills, and team effectiveness, among others.
Before discussion of other issues, it may be useful to highlight one important
difference between the sports psychology research reported in this issue and much
of the body of military psychological research: granularity. The research reported
in this issue could be characterized as focusing on microtasks or microepisodes of
performance; that is, performance periods that could be measured in seconds. This
very fine level of granularity is not typical of much research by military psycholo-
gists. Without speculating on the typicality of this level of granularity in sports
 PSYCHOLOGY IN SPORTS AND THE MILITARY S149

psychological research, this difference will be one factor that will need to be ad-
dressed in developing collaborative relationships between our disciplines, an issue
that will be revisited several times later in this commentary. This is not to say that
one approach is better or worse than the other; however, it may be useful to both
disciplines to consider how research at different levels of granularity would be in-
formative to our own efforts.

Expertise Development
The development of expertise is of obvious interest to the military, be it with regard
to basic soldier tasks, such as marksmanship, or strategic and operational planning.
The approaches offered in this issue may provide new insights into the develop-
ment of a variety of military skills. Formally, military approaches to performance
expertise focus on tasks, standards, and conditions. This approach does not lead to
discrimination in levels of performance beyond those defined by the standards, nor
does it necessarily lead to an understanding of the development of the skills under-
lying task performance. The approaches described here focus primarily on differ-
entiating between experts and relative novices in terms of how they approach per-
formance, though in several cases acknowledging the role of individual skills and
abilities. A deeper understanding of the quantitative and qualitative shifts that oc-
cur in the development of expertise has the potential to benefit the military through
more appropriately structured training, more efficient training through assessment
of an individual’s starting level of expertise, and understanding specifically what
skills are being developed and how those skills relate to performance of other
tasks. The approach discussed by Janelle and Hatfield (2008/this issue) regarding
the neurological differences that distinguish novices and experts provide an inter-
esting teaser into what might be possible for monitoring the development of exper-
tise and providing feedback to trainees during practice and rehearsal.
Ward, Williams and colleagues (Ward et al., 2008/this issue; Williams, Erics-
son, Ward, & Eccles, 2008this issue) present an interesting discussion of the devel-
opment of perceptual-cognitive skills. A significant strength of this research from
which military psychologists could draw in the immediate or near term is the work
focused on learning specific skills through simulation-type exercises and the ex-
tent to which this learning transfers to live performance in real and contrived con-
texts (e.g., baseball, tennis). Although this work has focused mostly on building
knowledge useful for anticipation, the methods utilized could readily be adapted to
focusing on other skills. As noted by Ward et al. (2008/this issue), decision-mak-
ing and situational awareness research may benefit from studies focused on antici-
pation. Research on psychosocial skills may also benefit from this line of research,
although the utilization of these methods may be significantly more difficult in this
domain. As pointed out by these authors, the military has been quite good at devel-
oping a wide variety of simulations but less apt at examining transfer to perfor-
S150 GOODWIN

mance in live contexts. As such, the guidance provided by these researchers is

quite valuable and might, for example, support current military emphasis on
first-person gaming-type platforms for training—R&D that has the potential
to revolutionize how training is conducted within the Army (see Kusumoto,
Gehorsam, Comer, & Grosse, 2006). However, significant care must be taken to
assure that training in this environment will produce or sustain the skills required
in real-world operations. As such, training research designs for these platforms are
encouraged to explicitly examining skill transfer to real-world environments.
As noted previously, the tasks studied in sports psychology are often very nar-
rowly scoped or microtasks relative to the focal areas of military psychologists. As
such, a substantive portion of the research described may apply directly to a nar-
rowly defined group of military personnel. Most military psychologists are fo-
cused on issues relevant to the broader population of service personnel. The work
by Ward, Williams, and colleagues (Ward et al., 2008/this issue; Williams, Erics-
son, Ward, & Eccles, 2008/this issue) on anticipation as a primary differentiator
between expert and novice performance is interesting, but within the military con-
text anticipation is most important at a much higher level of granularity. More im-
portant than anticipating specific behaviors of opponents is the anticipation of the
unfolding of a sequence of behavior within a tactical engagement or, in the context
of what the military refers to as higher order effects, across several tactical engage-
ments. In the context of sport, a more appropriate analogy would be examining ten-
nis across matches and sets rather than specific strokes or examining chess masters
across entire games or matches rather than particular gambits or moves.

Stress and Performance

The military has a long history of examining issues related to stress, including in-
vestigations of stress fatigue and stress-related disorders (e.g., posttraumatic stress
disorder, PTSD), stress mitigation strategies, and investigations of individual dif-
ferences related to the impact of stress on performance. Recent work (e.g., Adler,
Castro, & Britt, 2006; Adler, Huffman, Bliese, & Castro, 2005; Bartone, 1999,
2006; Britt & Bliese, 2003; Britt, Stetz, & Bliese, 2004; Jex, Bliese, Buzzell, &
Primeau, 2001; Stetz, Stetz, & Bliese, 2006; Thomas, Adler, & Castro, 2005;
Tucker, Sinclair, & Thomas, 2005) highlights just some of the recent focus of mili-
tary psychologists on stress and its impact in military contexts. Arguably, the mili-
tary interest in stress and its impact has been a substantive driver of stress-related
research for decades. That said, the discussion offered by Tenenbaum, Edmonds,
and Eccles (2008/this issue) of arousal, activation, and performance zones is inter-
esting and may provide an avenue for additional insights into the role of stress in
military operations. Because military operations are often characterized by ex-
tremes in arousal and stress levels (i.e., utter boredom vs. extreme physical and af-
fective stress), the strategies to maintain an optimal level of arousal or stress
 PSYCHOLOGY IN SPORTS AND THE MILITARY S151

throughout long periods of performance may be quite relevant to understanding

how soldiers may be able to optimally cope with operational stress.

Strategic Skills and Expertise

One area within sports psychology that was not touched on by these authors is the
role of coaches in planning and guiding their teams in execution of game strate-
gies. Within the military context, one area of extensive interest is operational and
strategic planning and execution. A military tactical engagement is roughly analo-
gous to a single point in tennis, a single down in football, or a single play in hockey
or basketball. Operational and strategic planning are more akin to the strategic ap-
proach and broad view when coaches look across entire games and seasons in
terms of approach to performance. The notion that a team or competitor should just
go out and win every game, point, series, or inning is far from the strategic realities
of coaching. Similarly, military planning and strategy does not simply take the ap-
proach of winning every engagement. By looking across multiple episodes, there
are some patterns or approaches that are more effective for the team and for longer
term success than others. In sport, it is the coach who is most often responsible for
taking this longer view of performance across time. It would be highly useful and
relevant to the military context to understand the development and assessment of
this type of strategic expertise.

Team Effectiveness
Another area that was generally not addressed, though it was touched on briefly by
Williams, Ericsson, Ward, and Eccles (2008/this issue), is the examination of team
effectiveness in sports. This is an area where sport psychologists have the potential
to make strong, substantive contributions. Many team sports (e.g., hockey, basket-
ball, volleyball), as practiced at the professional, semi-professional, and collegiate
levels, are highly dynamic and have several designated roles, with multiple team
members performing each role. These characteristics are shared by a variety of
small unit teams performing tactical missions in military contexts. Although team
effectiveness has long been an area of focus within military psychology (e.g., Can-
non-Bowers & Salas, 1998; Dyer, 1984; Salas, Bowers, & Cannon-Bowers, 1995),
much of this research has focused on team training. Many researchers focused on
team effectiveness utilize sports analogies (e.g., the “blind-pass”) to explain team
phenomena (e.g., implicit coordination); however, surprisingly, few teams re-
searchers have actually used sports teams to examine team issues. There remain a
variety of specific topics related to team effectiveness that are quite relevant to both
sports and military contexts. Because of the similar team structures and role-shar-
ing attributes, there are opportunities for learning more about internal team dy-
namics, shared cognition, and team development that will inform our understand-
S152 GOODWIN

ing of team effectiveness in both contexts. Additionally, there are intriguing

possibilities to gain further insights into team composition through the examina-
tion of sports teams, specifically with regard to balancing individual task expertise
with team dynamics, that are likely to be of interest to practitioners in both sports
and military domains.

Opportunities vs. Criticisms

In conclusion, I have a final comment on the collaborative opportunities available
to our disciplines. Several of the authors here note explicitly or implicitly the dif-
ferences in methodological and measurement rigor between many published stud-
ies in military contexts and those in sports psychology. Recognizing the limitations
faced in applied research settings, there are still approaches that could be taken to
introduce greater rigor—methodology and measurement—in military research.
One approach that could be better utilized by military psychologists is to develop
collaborative relationships with basic researchers with populations performing
tasks similar on critical dimensions. By explicitly linking research in applied set-
tings, where methods and measures may not be able to be as rigorous, to research
in basic settings, where rigor and construct validation can be emphasized, solid va-
lidity evidence can be obtained while maximizing generalizability of results. Ulti-
mately this is the intent across a body of research; however, more can be done as re-
search advances into the applied arena to reach back into more controlled and
controllable settings to examine specific issues that arise in applied research set-
tings. In short, generalization must not be a one-way street. Theory developed and
tested in a laboratory and then examined further in applied settings across general-
ized contexts can still be tested further by moving back into the laboratory for re-
finement in an iterative process. Developing these intensively collaborative rela-
tionships will demand significant effort, creativity, and willingness to listen and
learn on the part of both applied and basic researchers.

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