Comment by aswegs8
4 hours ago
Reminds me of amateur table tennis. There is a strange dynamic where you down regulate your performance unconsciously when the opponent is playing worse and vice versa.
Could be described as some physical form of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
The term would be conformity / normative social influence.
Surely this has nothing to do with specifically table tennis, nor that it's amateur.
A better example would be mixed boys/girls sports classes in school, where the boys deliberately hold back as to not injure/scare the girls.
It's a pretty obvious and human thing not to go out and completely destroy a much weaker opponent. We're social animals after all.
There also may be an element of energy conservation, there's objectively no need to put in any more effort than necessary. Inefficient.
I think the difference is that, in the table tennis example, it happens unconsciously and you can't help it. But you're right, it likely happens in most sports.
The mixed boys/girls classes example is, as you said, deliberate. And I too remember holding back on purpose in such situations when I was a kid.
With the arcade, no one was deliberately holding back. I'm sure of it.