The scene is familiar, even to those of us who don’t follow soccer: penalty shot. Goalie and player face off. One steps into the kick; the other dives across the goal.

And we assume (given what pro goalies are paid) that the reason they dive before there’s a clue where the ball is going is because it increases their odds of blocking it.

Some academics suspected otherwise. They analysed dozens of penalty kicks for science and found that the odds of saving the shot increased when goalies stayed in the centre. So why do they dive nine times out of ten?

It feels better.

In contexts where it’s normal for us to act, “action bias” makes it deeply uncomfortable to do nothing. Making a decision eases the anxiety of uncertainty. Add in the fear of regret, and you have a recipe for irrational behaviour that feels perfectly sane.

For goalies, the helpless feeling of moving too late feels like a much greater failure than diving one way while the ball sails the other, though the result is the same. When they dive, at least they “do something”—even while increasing their odds of failure.

Public figures aren’t immune from the human urge to “do something” either. Dr Ashley Bloomfield, a key Doer during the COVID era, recently shared that he’s proud of the way he made “big decisions with not much information.”

The reality—in soccer and in policymaking—is that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing.

He’s crediting himself with saving goals while the final score remains up for debate. The attempt to gain some clarity on what were goals and what weren’t is part of Phase Two of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19, for which public submissions just closed.

Either way, Bloomfield confirmed that they didn’t know where the balls were headed when they leaped. To ease the uncertainty introduced by the spread of a virus, our leaders made calls that ultimately added to it.

They didn’t know what locking people down for weeks—and then months—would do to families, businesses, education, the economy, healthcare, the elderly, or the vulnerable.

They didn’t know how an aspirational “elimination” plan would end.

They didn’t know if the exit strategy they picked—a vaccine that even the manufacturer said had no evidence for reducing transmission—would actually reduce transmission.

They didn’t know if a product with no long-term safety or efficacy data would be safe and effective long term.

And they didn’t seem to realise that mandating a new medical procedure for a chunk of the population, including every front-line worker, would cause chaos.

(They did, however, know that requiring vaccine passports would create a two-class society. That, plenty saw coming.)

I’m married to a footie fan who doesn’t believe that goalies’ odds improve when they wait to get better information about the ball’s trajectory. He’s seen the research, but he can’t imagine soccer being played any other way.

The reality—in soccer and in policymaking—is that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. Don’t let action bias tell you otherwise.