Why Emotions Run High For Sports Fans

We are in the thick of multiple sports seasons: the NBA finals are happening, and baseball and soccer are in full swing. For devoted fans, emotions can run pretty high during a game. Cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas https://anthropology.uconn.edu/person/dimitris-xygalatas/ has long been fascinated by that intensity — and how uniform it can be across fans. So, he and fellow researchers at the University of Connecticut decided to look into what exactly makes fans so deeply connected to their team and to fellow supporters. It turns out that connection may have less to do with actual gameplay and more to do with rituals. Their research was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2422779122. Questions about sports science? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Doppel. Social engineering attacks come in disguise, but Doppel sees through them. The Agentic platform shuts down threats, turns employees into first-line defenders, and more. Learn more at D-O-P-P-E-L dot com.

• 0:16Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:22Regina Barber?

  Short wavers, we are deep into one of the best seasons of the year, in my opinion. Baseball season.

• 0:29Regina Barber?

  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.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  I'm Dimitris Kzikalatas.

• 0:43Regina Barber?

  Dimitrius, 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.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Everybody was like flares and jumping up and down. And I remember I was too, 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.

• 1:32Regina Barber?

  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 Dimitrius wrote in his book Ritual a few years ago, these repeated communal actions can really bring out an intense spectrum of highs and lows.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  I've seen how sports led people to, to do extraordinary feats of cooperation.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:36Regina Barber?

  This personal passion has shaped Dimitrius's 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 during the game. 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

• 3:17Regina Barber?

  of unity and, at the same time, a seed of intense division. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  This message comes from Edward Jones. Where they believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest, it's also about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  This message comes from LexisNexis. Meet LexisNexis Protege, AI built for how legal teams and professionals work. Research, analyze, draft, and verify work you can defend. Protege is AI held to the standard of law. This message comes from Mint Mobile. While others have been hiking your bill, Mint Mobile has kept their wireless plans starting at $15 a month. Switch to Mint Mobile and get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month. Go to mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan required, $15 per month equivalent. New customer offer first three months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra.

• 4:52Regina Barber?

  So, Demetrius, what inspired you to start looking into sports rituals? Or like really any rituals?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  So I was reading reports about sociologists. Like, there's a French sociologist called D'Urquim, 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.

• 5:27Regina Barber?

  Like effervescence?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  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?

• 5:57Regina Barber?

  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?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  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 five 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.

• 6:23Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and to measure that, you and your team used electrodes under people's shirts. And they also had accelerometers attached to them, so you could not only monitor these fans' heartbeats, but you could actually like, see how they were moving and breathing. Like, tell me more about that process.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  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

• 7:23Speaker 02

  or watching the game on television. So it's not about what's happening in the pitch. It's about what's happening in the terraces.

• 7:31Regina Barber?

  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 US. And it sounds like you-

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Let's agree to call it real football.

• 7:43Regina Barber?

  We're gonna do that for the rest of the episode. We're gonna call it football. But you know, for our listeners,

• 7:49Regina Barber?

  it sounds like you found that the height of a fan's experience was not actually during the game. When was there like most, like you said, arousal, excitement, synchrony? When did that happen for these Brazilian football fans?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  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 psychological boost and also animate the fans themselves.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  So we wanted to see whether this pregame 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 pregame ritual, was when the home team scores a goal. And that is the goal that almost gave them the cup.

• 9:17Regina Barber?

  Wow. And so people were more aligned, that, you know, their hearts were beating as one. They were like euphoric during this ritual, more so than actually just watching the game.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:50Regina Barber?

  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 people's synchronicity. And it made me think about like how different fandoms are like around the world. So like, in your opinion, what's the difference between like US-based and international sports fandom?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  That's an excellent question because all of us who are come from outside of the United States and are fans, that 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 US, you 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.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  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 timeout, and it drops. And then it rises again, and then you have cheerleaders or something else, and then it drops again.

• 11:10Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:24Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so we're missing out on that unity, but we're also missing out on the beating each other up.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  That is true. There are two sides to this coin. And of course, every sports organization, 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.

• 11:53Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  And having loyalty that is too strong, on the other hand, and spills over into violence. It's not an easy balance to strike.

• 12:02Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  But that's the ideal.

• 12:04Regina Barber?

  So your book is about creating meaning. So what does this all mean to you about creating meaning? How we create, as humans, create meaning?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  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?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:14Regina Barber?

  Demetrius, thank you so much for talking to me about sports fandom. It's made me think about my obsessions a little bit differently.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thank you.

• 13:25Regina Barber?

  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 Burleigh McCoy and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.