A commentary on "Decision making in sports" by Johnson (2025)

In recognition of the 25th anniversary of Psychology of Sport and Exercise (PSE), Johnson (2025) provided an insightful overview of decision making in sports, detailing the foundations of this research in psychology and then outlining the growth of decision making research in sport psychology. The review highlighted the tremendous progression of this research area, outlining several theoretical approaches that have been proposed, and providing future directions that will continue to progress the area in the next 25 years. It is the latter which we have chosen to delve in to further in this commentary. Specifically, we contend that the key for advancing this area of research is the use of real-world data and representative study designs to further our understanding of the interactive and context-specific nature of decision making in sport. This will have implications for performance and training in sport, as well as wider implications for our understanding of how humans interact with the world. We provide a brief overview of the key points we took from the review by Johnson (2025) and build on each of these to highlight future directions for research that could provide unique insights into decision making in sport.