The world is full of surprises and the counterintuitive.  Take for example: the slower I eat, the fuller I seem to get.  Or, the more firm I am with my children or my students, the more they seem to respond to me.  They could be faking.  The British Psychological Society Research Digest reports some other counterintuitive information: soccer goalies do better not to jump to block penalty kicks.

Ofer Azar and colleagues in Israel watched hours of archival footage and noticed that goalkeepers save substantially more penalty kicks when they stay in the centre of goal than when they jump to the left or right. Yet paradoxically, in 93.7 per cent of penalty situations, keepers chose to jump rather than stay in the centre.

In fact, analysis of 286 penalty kicks taken in elite matches around the world showed that keepers saved 33.3 per cent of penalties when they stayed in the centre, compared with just 12.6 per cent of kicks when they jumped right and 14.2 per cent when they jumped left.

Do you have any other freakonomic and counterintuitive data like that?