India and Australia are tied. As the Australian player steps up, Kabir Khan watches her feet and stick and signals his goalkeeper: “Don’t move! Stay put!”. The keeper holds her ground, stays perfectly still in the centre, and the ball flies straight into her hands. Game over. India wins.
The moment works on screen because it feels counter-intuitive. Under pressure, standing still looks reckless. Yet that instinct—to act, to dive, to do something—is often precisely what gets us into trouble.
This column argues that one of the biggest risks facing Indian retail investors today is not market volatility, but a psychological compulsion to act, even when inaction would produce better outcomes.
The math backs the movie moment. Research on penalty shootouts shows that while shooters score about 84% of the time, a goalkeeper’s chance of making a save is significantly higher when she stays in the centre rather than diving left or right, roughly 3.5 times higher, according to one study.
So why do elite goalkeepers almost always dive? Behavioural scientists call this action bias: the tendency to prefer doing something over doing nothing, especially under pressure. Action signals effort. Inaction looks like failure, even when it improves the odds.
Why action feels irresistible
Action bias is deeply ingrained. For our ancestors, survival depended on reacting quickly to threats. A rustle in the bushes rewarded those who jumped first. We are the descendants of those instincts.
The modern environment amplifies this bias. We are constantly told to be decisive, to move fast, to hustle. Futurist Alvin Toffler warned that “information overload” would erode our ability to think deeply. Flooded with inputs, we default to reflex rather than reflection.
In 2024, Oxford named “brain rot” its word of the year, capturing a growing sense of mental fatigue caused by endless consumption of trivial online content. Toffler anticipated this decades ago: short, fast, loud stimuli that reward reaction over thought.
These low-effort actions—scrolling, clicking, reacting—deliver quick dopamine hits and the illusion of control, while steadily shrinking attention spans. The habit of constant engagement makes waiting feel uncomfortable, even irresponsible.
The market as a digital casino
In finance, this discomfort can be costly. The “kucch toh karna hai” itch shows up as excessive trading, constant portfolio tinkering, and rushed bets taken to avoid the feeling of missing out.
The Indian stock market offers a stark example. A research by the Securities and Exchange Baord of India (Sebi) shows that more than 90% of individual traders in the futures and options segment lose money. Yet retail participation remains high, driven less by probability than by the urge to participate.
Finfluencers intensify the problem. Sixty-second reels turn investing into entertainment, pushing urgency through phrases like “Don’t miss the rally!” or “Last chance to buy!”. Waiting and watching is framed as a mistake. The logic increasingly resembles online gambling, where the objective is not long-term wealth creation but the thrill of the next move.
Building guardrails against yourself
The cost of yielding to this bias is real. Savings meant to compound quietly, through mutual funds or provident fund contributions, are diverted into risky trades or speculative apps, undermining long-term goals such as buying a home or retiring securely.
The defence lies in building guardrails:
Set cooling-off periods before making large or risky trades.
Automate savings through mechanisms such as SIPs, removing the need for repeated decisions.
Rebalance periodically rather than reacting to every market movement.
As Blaise Pascal observed, most of humanity’s problems arise from an inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Wealth creation demands precisely that discipline. It rewards those who can stick to a dull, repeatable plan while others chase noise.
Financial success, in the end, is rarely about the brilliance of a quick move. More often, it comes from the nerve to do nothing while everyone else is diving.
Prodeepto Chatterjee is deputy general manager at the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority. Views expressed are personal.
