Racial differences in sports activities: A look at the self-paced versus reactive hypothesis.

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Abstract
Examined performance statistics for professional baseball and basketball players for racial differences in self-paced and reactive activities to test the hypothesis of M. Worthy and A. Markle (see record 2005-10594-001) that white athletes are superior at self-paced sports activities (e.g., pitching in baseball and free-throw shooting in basketball), while black athletes excell at reactive sports activities (e.g., hitting in baseball and field-goal shooting in basketball). The data confirm black superiority at hitting in baseball and white superiority at free-throw shooting. However, contrary to the hypothesis, black pitchers were superior to whites. No racial differences on field-goal shooting accuracy were obtained. It is concluded that the self-paced-reactive typology is too simple to account for the obtained variations in athletic performance. A 3-dimensional sports personality model is proposed which consists of 3 dominant motives (approval, achievement, and power) expressed in respective bipolar dimensions of team-individual, success-style, and competition-play. It is suggested that performance orientation is importantly influenced by where a person is placed on each of these dimensions. (16 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

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