Score a goal, and boost your team's confidence

Well, there is a football tournament on (and I am waiting with expectation for the results of the Ivory Coast and Angola games later today to see how my Fantasy Fussball team will fare - see earlier football related posting!).

Nature is reporting a paper in the online arXiv that looks at whether a team's scoring a goal results in increased confidence and then a flurry of goals. By looking a large number of results, the researchers found high scoring games occurring more often than they would expect. This suggests, they argue, that teams are encouraged when they score and then go on to score more. Read Nature's report (with a link to arXiv).