Why Emotions Run High For Sports Fans

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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Shortwavers, we are deep into one of the best seasons of the year, in my opinion. Baseball season. Every year, I love to root for my San Diego Padres. Though, to be honest, I don't spend a lot of time watching the players when I go to a game. It's all about my routines around the game. And I'm not the only one. I'm Dimitris Xigalatas.

Demetrius, or Professor X as his students call him, is a University of Connecticut cognitive anthropologist. He's a lifelong fan of football, or soccer as we call it in the States. I vividly remember the first time I went to the sports stadium in Greece. That was in 1985. My team, or what was later to become my team because of that experience, was on its way to winning a title.

And the stadium looked like a ball of fire. Everybody was lighting flares and jumping up and down. And I remember I was too small to see what was happening in the pitch. My father kept lifting me up. And it was that experience that ritualized chanting and jumping up and down among the fans that really turned me into a fan. And through the repetition of that experience, week after week, year after year, that's how you become a fan.

all that repetition turns into rituals. These sometimes little but still important, repeated behaviors. Like how growing up my dad would take me to Padre games every summer. We would eat hot dogs and popcorn, and I'd watch him filling in the scorecard. And as Demetrius wrote in his book Ritual a few years ago, these repeated communal actions can really bring out an intense spectrum of highs and lows. I've seen how sports led people to...

to do extraordinary feats of cooperation. I've stayed in someone's house in Germany when I was traveling as a college student because he saw my scarf. On the other hand, I've seen the dark side of that. And in fact, I almost got murdered once again for wearing that same scarf in the streets of Athens. I got attacked by a gang just because I was wearing the wrong insignia. I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't provoke anyone.

I found myself on the floor being beaten by four men. And I got lucky because there was another group of fans, this time wearing the right insignia, who came to my rescue. This personal passion has shaped Demetrius' career. He went on to study all the ways people engage in rituals, including recently how they come up in sports. He and his research team found that the fans who are the most emotionally invested in a basketball game were the ones watching in the stands.

And most recently, Dimitri studied a crowd in Brazil during an annual event called Street of Fire, where fans welcomed their football team to the stadium with flares and fireworks. And they found something shocking. The emotional highs of the fans mostly didn't happen. So today on the show, sports rituals. What they tell us about human behavior and how being a number one fan can be a source of unity and at the same time, a seed of intense division.

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Listen to What Could Go Wrong now on Audible at audible.com slash what could go wrong. So Demetrius, what inspired you to start looking into sports rituals or like really any rituals?

So I was reading reports about sociologists, like there's a French sociologist called Amir Durkheim, who mentions this feeling he calls collective effervescence. The best way to describe it for me is that if you've ever been part of a... massive crowd, this could be a football stadium or a rock concert or a religious ceremony, and you feel goosebumps at the back of your neck when you're chanting with thousands of individuals, that's what he had in mind.

He called this collective effervescence. Like effervescence. And this resonated effervescence because the crowd is bubbling up. And... This description really resonated with what people performing those rituals would tell me. They would say things like, when we go up there and we enact this collective ceremony, we all feel like one. Some of them specifically said our hearts beat as one.

during those ceremonies. There's thousands of us, but we feel like one. And I started thinking, okay, how can we...

measure this feeling of oneness, this emotional alignment. And to study this, you and your team measured how emotionally aligned people were when they were attending a basketball game. So how did you do that? Yes, so we're looking at how similar their heart rates are at any given time point. So if my heart rate is 75 and yours is 80, and we define that range as 5 beats per minute, we're within that range.

now and maybe the next second we're not and maybe the second after that we are again yeah and to measure that you and your team used electrodes under people's shirts uh and they also had accelerometers attached to them so you could not only monitor like these fans heartbeats but you could actually like see how they were moving and breathing. Like, tell me more about that process. So for every game or most games, we had about 20 people wearing those devices.

And we put those devices on not just with groups of people watching the game in the stadium, but also with groups of people watching the game live on television. And of course, fans do react, do get very emotional. when watching their team play on television, but they'll all tell you that it's not the same as being in the stadium. And that's exactly what we find there. In fact, we analyzed the structure of these games for anything we could think of. How fast the games were.

how big the lead was, you name it. And we found that the most important predictor of that group synchrony is whether people are physically located in the stadium or watching the game on television. So it's not about what's happening in the pits, it's about what's happening in the terraces.

So all of this led you most recently to go down to Brazil and study your favorite sport, football, or soccer as it's known in the U.S. Let's agree to call it real football. We're going to do that for the rest of the episode. We're going to call it football, but for our listeners, it sounds like you found that the height of a fan's experience was not actually during the game. When was...

They're like most, like you said, arouse, excitement, synchrony. When did that happen for these Brazilian football fans? Yes. So now in Brazil, we're looking at what happens within a cup final. And we're giving these devices to members of a fan club to wear, not just during the game, but a few hours before. So as they engage in this pre-game ritual that involves... The fans lining up on a big avenue, waiting for the team's bus carrying the players to cross that avenue.

And as it approaches, they start lighting flares and chanting and jumping up and down. There's a lot of emotion. There's a lot of excitement. And the stated goal of this ritual is to animate the players. and give them a psychological boost and also animate the fans themselves. So we wanted to see whether this pre-game ritual, whether this would create the same kind of emotional alignment as the game itself.

And what we found is that not only does it match that level of alignment, it actually exceeds it. In fact, the only part of the game that created that level of emotional arousal, the same as the pre-game ritual. was when the home team scores a goal. And that is the goal that almost gave them the cup. Wow. And so people were more aligned, that their hearts were beating as one. They were euphoric.

during this ritual more so than actually just watching the game. Yes. And in fact, we even had a monitor on the bus driver who was carrying the delegation. Somebody seated. and who's not jumping up and down, who's not lighting any flares. And we find that he's basically at the group average. He's just as much emotional excitement at any given moment as the average fan. Wow.

that's really cool okay so this new analysis really helped you look at like really fine detail of what was like affecting these these people's synchronicity and and it made me think about like how

different fandoms are around the world. So in your opinion, what's the difference between US-based and international sports fandom? That's an excellent question, because all of us who come from outside of the United States and are fans, we see a major difference in how fandom operates. They tend to be structurally different.

And what I mean by this is that in the U.S. we have so many interruptions. Sometimes I feel that I don't even want to finish watching a game in the United States because I just forget who's playing. between all of the timeouts and the shows and the interviews and the commercials. In Europe, it's very different. And it's particularly different in the context of football, where you have the only major sport.

that has 45 minutes of uninterrupted action. And in our data, we're beginning to be able to say something about this. So when you look at what happens at football, you have this sustained emotional alignment between fans. But in our basketball data, we see that...

As emotional alignment begins to rise, then you have the first time out, and it drops. And then it rises again, and then you have cheerleaders or something else, and then it drops again. So these interruptions prevent the fans from engaging in those.

long ritualized interactions that at the end of the day are what creates that sense of loyalty and fanship. Yeah. So we're missing out on that unity, but we're also missing out on the... beating each other up that is true there are two sides to this uh coin and of course every sports organization every every club is going to want to

to think very carefully about striking a balance, finding that Goldilocks zone between having brand loyalty and having fans that care deeply about the team, enough to buy season tickets, and having loyalty that is... too strong, on the other hand, and spills over into violence. It's not an easy violence to strike. Yeah. But that's the ideal.

Your book is about like creating meaning. So what does this all mean to you about creating meaning? How we create as humans create meaning? When we ask ourselves what it is that makes us human. We can talk about tool use and tool making and bipedalism or this or that. But if you think about it, if you start asking people, and as an anthropologist, I do that all the time.

What makes for a good life rather than just a survival? They tend to point to those kinds of things like art, things like religion, things like ritual, things like group affiliation. group identity, sports, all of those manifestations of culture that when you look at them at first glance, they seem to be utterly pointless. But at the end of the day, the answer to this is that we care because we're humans.

So what characterizes us as humans, in my opinion, is our propensity, our ability, and in fact, our deep-seated need. to create meaning from things that seem to be intrinsically meaningless. Demetrius, thank you so much for talking to me about sports fandom. It's made me think about my obsessions a little bit differently. My pleasure. Thank you.

If you liked this episode, follow us on the NPR app or your podcasting platform of choice. You'll infuse cool science into your day. Plus, it really helps our show. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

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