global sport senior scholar
Michael McBeath
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Prior to the founding of the Global Sport Institute in 2017, researchers at ASU who were interested in sport did not always find funding for their ideas. For Michael McBeath, a professor of psychology at ASU, the resources were scattered here and there, from places like the ASU kinesiology program or outside resources, but there was not a unified support system from inside the university that was solely focused on furthering the academic study of sport. McBeath, a cognitive scientist who has been with ASU since 1998, explores how humans and animals perceive the world in natural environments. For him, sport was clearly a fertile ground for deepening society’s understanding of how physics and sensory changes affect perception. Once the Global Sport Institute launched, he was ready with ideas. McBeath was originally funded in 2017 and has used that research to publish four separate journal articles. His original experiment explored human perception in sport, including how accurate umpires are at calling runners safe or out in a baseball game or whether basketball players can correctly judge if a ball has gone out of bounds off themselves or an opponent. These instances show how sight, sound and time collide to impact how humans experience the world. The experiment has been used to tell many different stories within sport and neuroscience. In addition to these new research opportunities, McBeath has also found commonality among fellow sport scholars who see sport as a terrain whereby the world can be improved. At events and meetings put on by the institute,
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A N N UA L R E P O R T 2020–21
McBeath has found like-minded researchers within the ASU community who share a passion for sport and a mutual interest in making progress in their field of study by incorporating sport into their work.
“It’s neat that we can look at real sporting events and have these conclusions which are generalizable to more important, real-world phenomena.” “The way the Global Sport Institute has promoted itself is really expansive to a lot of other areas, where sport can really help in a variety of ways,” McBeath added. We continue to see funded projects, which are developed further by insightful academics, find homes in publications seen by wider audiences. The most recent seed grants for this academic year are approaching the finish line, with deliverables coming that will broaden how sex, gender and sexuality intersect within sport. Like McBeath and his extensive work, we look forward to seeing these projects flourish in many different areas. McBeath and Ty Tang worked together on “Why Observers Perceive the Same Event Differently: Testing the Effects of Reference Frame and Conscious Agency in Sports.” An example of the test ran by McBeath and Tang, which sought to find how bias plays a role in the way humans perceive and interpret out-ofbounds plays in sport.
