Social post-error adaptations across four NBA basketball seasons

Abstract Error monitoring, a crucial aspect of behavioral regulation, has been studied extensively in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Lab studies often observe that people become more cautious after both own and others’ errors. Moreover, social error monitoring research suggests that cooperation elicits stronger adaptations to others’ errors than competition. However, these insights primarily stem from controlled reaction time tasks, limiting generalization to real-world social settings. To address this, we investigated whether basketball players become more cautious after missing compared to making shots, and whether these adaptations differ when the miss was by themselves, teammates or opponents. Meta-analyses of four NBA-seasons revealed increased caution in terms of shot distance and angle following missed compared to made shots, with the most pronounced effect after own, next teammates’ and last opponents’ errors. While controlling for rebound shots reduced the effects, the general pattern remained. Additional analyses also revealed a positive correlation between post-error caution and accuracy, suggesting post-error caution may serve to improve shooting accuracy. These findings not only extend cognitive theories from controlled 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 this aspect of performance.