Social Context Shapes Error Responses in Padel Athletes: Evidence from a controlled lab experiment

Error monitoring allows individuals to detect and adapt to mistakes, a process critical in high-stakes environments such as team sports. While widely studied at the individual level, people also monitor and respond to others’ errors. However, research on athletes has largely focused on individual errors. Furthermore, monetary-based manipulations in non-sport studies limit their applicability to team sports. To address these challenges, the present study investigated social post-error adaptations in padel, a doubles racket sport, using a social version of the Eriksen flanker task. Forty-six padel players alternated between action execution and observation under two conditions, once alternating with their teammate and once with an opponent. Results revealed distinct behavioral adaptations to teammates’ and opponents’ errors. Participants showed post-error slowing following teammates’ errors, but post-error speeding following opponents’ errors. Exploratory analyses indicated that individual differences in cohesion were associated with reduced post-error speeding in the opponent condition. Accuracy remained high across conditions, with no significant post-error accuracy effects. These findings demonstrate that, even outside the complexity of gameplay, the teammate-opponent relationship modulates athletes’ error responses, revealing that it is grounded in social cognition. By combining a controlled experimental paradigm with a team sport context, this study not only extends prior monetary-based research to an ecologically valid setting, it also offers insights for coaches, sport psychologists and performance analysts on how social dynamics shape athletes’ behavioral adaptations.