Down at the half

The surprising benefits of being behind

Pop quiz: It's halftime during the NCAA championship game. The buzzer sounds, and the team you've picked to go all the way is a point down. Who's going to win?

Don't be shocked if your players come back to win the game. Odds are, that's what they'll do.

A recent study by two business professors at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania looked at more than 6,000 college basketball games and found that teams that are just slightly behind at halftime are more likely to win the game.

It may sound strange to say you should be glad to see your team trailing at the half. But understanding why is key to understanding all kinds of human motivation, in areas from classroom achievement to corporate competitiveness.

Jonah Berger, a coauthor of the study, titled "When Losing Leads to Winning," said the idea arose from something that intrigued him while coaching youth soccer: he "always felt like the kids worked harder when we were slightly behind at halftime." Along with Wharton colleague Devin Pope, Berger crunched the numbers on basketball games and found that teams trailing by one point at the half went on to win 51.3 percent of the time.

To be certain they weren't just seeing an effect peculiar to basketball, Berger and Pope devised a lab test. They gave subjects a timed button-pushing task and told them they were playing against a hidden competitor. Halfway through, they paused and told the participants they were either far behind, slightly behind, tied, or slightly ahead. Subjects who believed they had only a small gap to close showed greater effort once they returned to the task. The other groups didn't show the same burst of energy.

This kind of drive will sound familiar to anyone racing to finish a report faster than a cubicle mate, receiving a test score just points behind a lab partner, or trailing a road race competitor by just a few dozen steps. Other studies have shown that having a clear but reachable goal is a powerful motivating force.

But not everyone wins when they're just a touch behind. What separates the teams that overcame the halftime gap from the ones that didn't? In their final test, Berger and Pope again told subjects how they were performing relative to competitors, but also polled them on how they felt about their ability to succeed. Those with higher confidence tried harder to overcome the deficit. Their belief in their own abilities, it emerged, determined the level of response to their "halftime" feedback.

This phenomenon is known to psychologists as "self-efficacy," the confidence that you not only can, but must, get something done despite obstacles or outside influences.

"If you have that resiliency, then being behind can act as a motivator and a focus," said Deborah L. Feltz, a professor at Michigan State University and coauthor of the book "Self-Efficacy in Sport." But if you lack this inherent feeling, "then you're really going to beat yourself before you've even stepped on the floor."

In success psychology, it's still an open question whether that self-assurance needs to be merited, or if it can be created on the spot. Sandra Short, a psychologist at the University of North Dakota and a coauthor of "Self-Efficacy in Sport" with Feltz, is doing research on a new theory that convincing yourself you're confident is just as powerful as actually being confident. And Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist, has written that self-efficacy can be increased by verbal persuasion - hence the halftime pep talk. Bandura determined that people who are verbally persuaded "are more likely to mobilize greater effort and sustain it" than if they lack reinforcement and dwell on what they're doing wrong.

"I always talk to myself on the court, especially if I'm struggling," says Siena College senior Kenny Hasbrouck, whose team was down by five points at halftime during its first-round game but came back to beat Ohio State in overtime. "I tell myself to forget about a turnover, forget about a shot, [and] box out my man."

So, assuming you've got the confidence in your own abilities, should you actually strive to be a bit behind? The technique is often used in head-to-head sports, where a marathoner or bike racer might stay strategically shy of a competitor while saving up the energy for a winning push. But for sports where you need to score repeatedly to win, there are dangers to relying on the numbers on the board.

Adam Naylor, a sports psychologist at Boston University, says that teams risk overconfidence if they see themselves ahead, or deflation if they see themselves too far behind. Even if the numbers show it's helpful to be just a touch behind, he says, there are limits to how literally that insight should be applied.

"You don't want to tell your coach to make sure you're losing at halftime," Naylor said. "I'd lose every job I had if I told that to a coach."

Nicole Cammorata is a member of the Globe staff.