BYS x TIGA Collaboration
I was very lucky to get to collaborate with TIGA to teach young golfers 5 behavorial economics topics that I believed would help them improve their mental game on the course, and thus improve their golf game overall! I taught the peak end rule, hero shot mentality, loss aversion, sunk cost fallacy and emotional frequency.
I used the peak end rule, which states how we remember certain moments based on the peak and the end moment, to emphasize how we shouldn’t be too affected after we have bad hole in golf, and recognize how if we end with a good shot, we can still look back on our round and think positively about it. Cultivating this more forward mindset and being more encouraging to yourself will also help you play better. The hero shot mentality refers to how we are always inclined to hit the most aggressive shot to save ourselves after we put ourselves in a bad situation. And although a lot of the kids argued with me and said their aggressive shots are worth it, I informed them on how statistically, taking the riskier shot doesn’t always work, and very often can compound into worser outcomes. Allowing them to be aware of this inclination can motivate them to hit safer shots, creating a more stable game throughout.
I explained loss aversion with an example using money. Letting them understand how getting 10 dollars doesn’t feel that amazing, but losing 10 dollars makes you feel strongly. This correlates to golf as we will always feel more emotional after a loss, like getting a double bogey. If we hit a par, we might still think to ourselves why we couldn’t have made a birdie. This inclination lets the golfers focus on how to regulate their negative emotions after a bad hole. Sunk cost fallacy refers to when we see that we have put so much effort into something already, that we might as well keep going, even if it is not giving us the preferred outcome. In golf, compounding mistakes happen all the time, so when golfers hit one bad shot, it often leads to many many more following bad shots. Being aware of our inclination to mentally ‘give up’ and keep going with careless shots, I urged the golfers to reset their minds, and treat each shot as a new opportunity, and try to not think about what has already been done in the past.
Lastly, educating the kids about emotional frequency was a nice ending to the program as it is useful in almost all aspects of life. All emotions function on different frequencies, more positive, the higher the frequency. It is thought that it is impossible to attract good outcomes externally if internally we are not functioning on a high frequency. This is because like attracts like, so if we are feeling frustrated and angry after hitting a bad shot, negative outcomes will follow, unless we change our mindset.
I worked with kids ages ranging from 8 to 15 years old, and hosted 3 week long sessions teaching them these concepts! It was a great experience for me and I was able to collect some data through before and after questionnaires to gage if understanding cognitive biases actually improved the kids’ mental game. I found that this was the case! I measured confidence, focus, and self awareness levels, as well as emotional regulation and decision making strategies, and lots of students reported better numbers in all these categories after learning about our brain patterns!
These concepts are not frequently used in golf, and rarely used in golf training, which is why I thought this would be a great addition to the TIGA junior golf camps, where kids are practicing golf hard core each day. I love imparting my knowledge I have learned through behavioral economics to a variety of people and hope it was helpful!
