Pod Insights Something You Should Know How Your Sense of Taste Really Works & Why Sports Fans Care So Much About this episode Driving with a cold might seem harmless — but research suggests even mild illness can seriously impair reaction time, focus, and judgment. Could driving while sick actually be more dangerous than driving drunk? This episode begins with some surprising evidence about what happens when you get behind the wheel with a cold or flu. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2283323/Dont-sniffle-drive-Driving-cold-dangerous-drunk-driving.html
Why do some people love foods that others can’t stand? And why do foods you hated as a child sometimes become favorites later in life? Taste feels subjective, but it’s driven by biology, psychology, memory, and expectation. Beth Kimmerle joins me to explain how taste and flavor really work — and how our preferences can change over time. Beth is a sensory science expert who literally tastes food for a living (yes, her tongue is insured). She’s founder of Attribute Analytics and author of several books on sweets and flavor, including Chocolate: The Sweet History. (https://amzn.to/4s92MEB).
Being a sports fan can feel deeply personal — victories feel like our wins, losses feel painful, and loyalty can last a lifetime. But why does sports fandom inspire such intense emotion? What psychological needs does it fulfill? And why do fans speak in terms of “we” instead of “they”? Aaron C. T. Smith explains what drives sports fandom and why being a fan can be so powerful. He is professor of management at Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle, and author of The Psychology of Sports Fans.(https://amzn.to/49a5yRc)
And finally — who wakes up grumpier in the morning, men or women? There actually is research on this, and it reveals some surprising insights into mood, sleep, and biology. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2292195/Its-official-Women-ARE-grumpier-men-mornings.html
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.
0:30 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know, how driving when you have a cold can be more dangerous than driving drunk. Then, a look at all the things that influence how food tastes.
0:43 Speaker 02 How does packaging, how does marketing, how does color or storytelling literally change how something tastes? As researchers, we know that people can rate the exact same products higher if some marketing feels more premium.
0:58 Mike Carruthers? Also, who's more likely to wake up grumpier, a man or a woman? And the psychology of sports fans. Why do people identify so strongly with teams and athletes?
1:10 Speaker 03 We know from research, fans are twice as likely to change their marriage partner as they are their sporting team allegiance. But what's beautiful about sport is that that love tends not to diminish, unlike our romantic partners with whom we get bored.
1:24 Mike Carruthers? All this today on Something You Should Know.
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1:58 Mike Carruthers? And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with a thousand chances to win a thousand dollars, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win.
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2:54 Speaker 04 Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.
3:08 Mike Carruthers? So if you had a cold or the flu, but you had to go somewhere, would you still drive there? I bet you would. Most people would. But maybe you shouldn't. And that's what we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. There's a warning from a study that suggests that driving with a cold or the flu can be even more dangerous than driving drunk. Researchers compared the reaction time of cold sufferers against the reaction time of people with alcohol blood levels above the legal limit. The results found that those with a cold had lower alertness levels than those who were over the legal limit. The drivers who had a cold had a tendency to follow too closely
3:53 Mike Carruthers? and took longer to stop the car on command. It seems that when your body is fighting an infection, memory and movement can be impaired, regardless of the severity of the illness. And if you add a sneeze on top of it, you're really increasing the risk because a sneeze can take your eyes off the road for as much as three full seconds. And that is something you should know.
4:20 Mike Carruthers? Isn't it interesting how some people love certain foods? And other people just hate them? And even with the foods we like, some we really like, while others are just, eh, they're okay, they're fine. And if you recall, there are probably foods you didn't like when you were younger that now you do. So how did that happen? Why does our sense of taste change over time? And how do things like packaging, color, presentation, and expectation affect how a food tastes? Well, here to explain all this is Beth Kimmerly. She's a sensory science expert, meaning she tastes food for a living. She's founder of Attribute Analytics, which is a platform that helps companies that make
5:03 Mike Carruthers? packaged food use taste data to drive product success. She's also written four books about chocolate and sweets. Hi, Beth, welcome to Something You Should Know.
5:13 Speaker 02 Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me.
5:16 Mike Carruthers? So you taste food for a living. I mean, I know your job entails much more than that, but that is part of it, that you taste food for a living, which sounds pretty appealing to me. But explain what it is you do exactly.
5:30 Speaker 02 Oh, great, great question. In the food and beverage industry, there are folks like me who are practitioners of sensory evaluation, otherwise known as taste experts. There's folks that specialize, so there's coffee tasters, or chocolate tasters, or tea tasters, but, you know, we're at the expert level. So folks like us have our tongues often insured because of the value they bring to our work. In my case, I not only have my tongue, but my olfactory bulb insured, much like famous people have, you know, body parts insured.
6:13 Speaker 02 I don't know, Keith Richards' hands, I'm imagining, are insured, or Ronaldo's legs. We assess food products on behalf of the food industry and supply data around taste and texture and aftertaste, aroma, all really, really important things that the food industry, food and beverage industry wants to know.
6:37 Mike Carruthers? And so I would always would have assumed that because taste is so individual that that it isn't a science so much as it's because you may say something tastes great and I may say it that's the worst thing I ever ate.
6:53 Speaker 02 Uh huh, yes. So for most of us, our taste buds detect five basic tastes. But there's these other elements, these other things that you're that you're referring to that that are at play. So aroma, memory, even even expectation can alter how we perceive taste. And sometimes it takes over and does much of the work. So if I were to say to a room full of untrained tasters, hey, describe this chocolate. And they're all tasting the same chocolate, just like you're saying, you know, some may describe a feeling of nostalgia.
7:33 Speaker 02 And and some may may focus on how it feels in their mouth and the and the what we call the melt rate. And while other might others might describe tastes like, you know, they might detect tastes like bitter sour. And and that's because taste isn't just a chemical reaction in our body. It is a perception shaped by our life experience. And so what we do with sensory analysis, it is a science and it involves using trained human tasters and a methodology. So we transform aroma, taste, texture, and aftertaste into a language
8:15 Speaker 02 that we can use to generate structured and usable what we call empirical data. So when people when people talk about about, hey, how do you how are you able to do that? If you if you think about it, we're not interested in. Subjective words, we are what sommeliers are to wine. We are to food because we have this lexicon and have tasted so many food products that we can really understand or detect the, what we call the flavor wheel of food.
8:46 Mike Carruthers? So can you turn it on and off? Because you must have the same things that I have about memories about food and certain foods you like or don't like. Do you turn it on and off?
8:58 Speaker 02 It's, that's an incredible question because so, so taste memories are emotional, right? They're, they're powerful and we're oftentimes chasing these experiences, right? It's not, we're not, we're not thinking about them as a flavor. You, you grab an item off the grocery store shelf because it reminds you of that experience that you had, mostly those good ones. And so, so we, you can turn it on and off and, and it's the hardest thing to train somebody to do because in our lives today, Mike, we go through life liking and disliking.
9:40 Speaker 02 Liking and disliking things online, liking and disliking, you know, thumbs up on, on your text messages. And so you have to divorce yourself from liking or disliking and only use objective language. And it's, it's incredible and that's what, that's what sensory evaluation is, this ability to be able to use this objective language and not, and divorce yourself from, from liking or disliking. And there's certain things that help you do it. So we don't look at things in, in packages, right? Cause packages can influence our, or presentation can influence how we perceive taste. And we are trained to respond almost like can be robots or, or machines so that we
10:24 Speaker 02 can utilize this, this portion of our brain that, that, that can give us data or, or objective information.
10:33 Mike Carruthers? So I have heard, and I think we have all heard, this notion that taste is primarily smell. Is that true or not?
10:41 Speaker 02 It is true. That's 100% true. So if you were to hold your nose and eat a, let's call it strawberry jelly bean, so you're not using your nasal cavity, it's gonna taste off or flat just because you're only tasting sweet. So aromas are really the indicator, aroma is the indicator of taste. And the ability to taste, if your nasal cavity is blocked, you know, if you're sick, much of food flavor disappears. And so that's the proof that taste buds aren't, you know, they're just a starting point. And aroma plays into taste heavily. And it's really aroma plus taste that give us flavor.
11:26 Mike Carruthers? And when people like or dislike food, as you said, you know, we could have memories from childhood, or there could be other subjective factors. But objectively, do people like or dislike food? It's just that I just happen to like it and you just don't? And that's the beginning and end of it?
11:47 Speaker 02 So some of these differences have to do with how many taste buds we have on our tongue, or papillae, as they're called. And even like our saliva chemistry can amplify or alter flavor perception. You know, genetics, all these, all these things come into play. If one person likes something and another, another person doesn't like, again, you know, it could be memory influencing. It could be, it could be things like age, or medication, or illness. There's so many things that go into taste. But really, we have found that repeated exposure, social context,
12:30 Speaker 02 and positive influences or experiences can really help retrain our palate. So if you know somebody who doesn't like something, you could work with them. And we see this often in like, let's call it bitter foods, or even think about the trend in super sour candy with kids, you know.
12:53 Speaker 02 Twenty-five years ago or thirty-five years ago, kids might have spit out super sour candy because it was too sour, but they got trained with these experiences and now they've learned to enjoy those foods.
13:07 Mike Carruthers? Is that it? And here's what I mean. Like, if you give a kid a sip of beer or whiskey, which you shouldn't do, it's probably illegal.
13:19 Speaker 02 No, probably not. It's probably a bad idea, Mike.
13:22 Mike Carruthers? But if you did, they're gonna go, "That's the worst thing. Tastes like cough syrup." It's gonna be horrible. They're not gonna like it. Ten years from now, they could be drinking it and liking it. So is it just because they were exposed to it enough times? Or could their tastes have actually changed and now they actually like it when then they didn't?
13:44 Speaker 02 Maybe a little bit of both. So, again, it's this repeated exposure, right? So that was their first sip, and now they're on their tenth, or maybe they're off to drinking ABVs, who knows? But it's also social context. So if you think about the social piece of food, right? We're oftentimes with others and experiencing food, whether it's beer or candy, in social settings. And so, and so we can change. And some of that has to do with the way our taste buds change over time. If you think about what a baby needs and wants in flavor, it's sweet, and they're really
14:29 Speaker 02 looking for the sweetness of, you know, mother's milk. And that's how our taste buds work. So this question is about where we are in our, in our, in our life. And then, how much have we been exposed to this product, whether it's beer or otherwise? What's the social context in which we've enjoyed the product? And have we really enjoyed the product? Has it been a positive experience? Or has everybody around us shared this, this same drink and frowned?
15:00 Mike Carruthers? I want to ask you, how and how possible and likely is it to change someone's taste so they like a food that maybe they don't like now? Or, you know, give up a food that they do like that maybe they shouldn't? I'm talking with Beth Kimmerle. She is a sensory science expert.
15:21 Speaker 00 Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.
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16:17 Mike Carruthers? So Beth, if you wanted to work with a child, or get someone to change their taste away from a food, or towards a food, how do you do it?
16:28 Speaker 02 That's a great question, because if you, as the parent, can create what they call this positive experience, repeated exposure, create a social context. So let's just back up from that. What does that mean? You introduce foods repeatedly, right? So repeated exposure means you're showing up with the broccoli and the mac and cheese at the same time, and then at some point, you're eliminating the mac and cheese, and you're just constantly exposing the "fussy eater" to the item that you wish them to enjoy, and that you're showing
17:13 Speaker 02 them how to eat it yourself. So when we talk about this social context piece of it, it's really showing them that you can have a positive experience with it. Instead of just putting it on the plate, you're picking up that piece of broccoli, you're showing them how delicious it is, and training them through your actions, as opposed to just putting it on the plate. So yes, there's a method to working with fussy eaters, and it's also around being less emotional, strangely enough.
17:50 Speaker 02 Less reactive and and and just and just exposing.
17:55 Mike Carruthers? We all like sweet, right?
17:58 Speaker 02 I have I have never met anybody who is is just totally opposed to sweet. I do know people who don't like sweets in general. They're they sort of they they sort of run towards savory. But I don't know anybody who's just shut down from sweet. And that is an evolutionary. There is an evolutionary reason for that. And that is because sweet, let's call it carbohydrates. Sweet sweet keeps humans alive. Sweet as a taste keeps humans alive or have has kept humans alive. And so it's a really, really important, basic taste. It is. It is one of the more important, especially again, for for children and babies.
18:43 Speaker 02 Because sweets probably the first, you know, the first taste that they that that babies taste.
18:50 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, well, I've always been interested in this idea of portion control in the sense that I've noticed. And I've kind of done experiments with myself on this. When you're put when a plate of food is put in front of you,
19:05 Mike Carruthers? there's a tendency to want to eat the food that's on that plate. And if you get a smaller portion of food, there's a tendency to want to eat that and that that'll be enough. Just like what you said about, you know, if you give me a big piece of pie, well, I'll eat the big piece of pie. If you gave me a smaller piece, that's probably fine, too. But but we're seeing that portions get bigger and bigger. And and when you see a plate of food in front of you, you tend to want to eat the plate of food.
19:34 Speaker 02 Exactly. And and and I think what we what we call those in our industry is. What are the expectations and how do those affect how we perceive taste? So you're talking about large and small. We oftentimes talk about appearance in terms of size and shape and color. There's so many different ways we can, what we call modulate these expectations because they really prime the brain. There's a quote that says, "We eat with our eyes." If you think about that in terms of, you're talking about portion control, but we look at how does packaging, how does marketing,
20:16 Speaker 02 how does color or type style or storytelling literally change how something tastes? And so as researchers, we know that people can rate the same product, this exact same product higher if some marketing feels more premium, right? So their expectation is elevated and they like that product better. Or even, you know, consumers, if something doesn't feel authentic or if they notice it's broken.
20:53 Speaker 02 Meaning, have you ever gotten a cracker or a cookie out of a package and it's not whole? Then that will shift your perception. Well, it doesn't taste as good.
21:02 Mike Carruthers? Well, it does seem, and I imagine everybody's had an experience where their taste has changed over time. Like when I was a kid, I used to drink a lot of soda. I can't drink a soda now. I just, it's so sweet and syrupy. And because I stopped, I just, I realized that they weren't healthy and I backed off and got to the point where now I don't want one.
21:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that's that interesting thing about how you had repeated exposure, right? At some point, you drank a lot of soda and you had the social context or experience that trained your palate to think that that was a good thing. And then at some point, whether it was the social context, learning how much sugar is actually in a traditional soda or seeing people around you drink alternatives, right? Again, you know, our taste can change and that has to do with. Sort of this learned information and then sometimes taste sensitivity changes with age,
22:10 Speaker 02 right? Or illnesses or medications and they can that can dull or distort flavor perception. I would if somebody put a traditional can of soda in front of me that had either keen sugar, corn syrup in it, and I wasn't in tasting mode and it was a it was a choice, I wouldn't I'd prefer water. I think that has to do with social contexts. We learned more about sugary drinks. But I also, because I worked for, you know, I've worked for companies like Starbucks along the way, and I've learned to drink unsweetened coffee because of coffee
22:52 Speaker 02 cuppings and really like, you know, that that was that exposure thing, learning to enjoy foods that we maybe initially disliked.
23:02 Mike Carruthers? Well, I think people like to think that they know what they like and they like what they like. But as you were saying, we are so susceptible to marketing and like, you know, if the cracker is broken, I mean, the things that influence what we like or don't like are seem from what you're saying, I mean, there's a lot of things at play here that we way under the radar.
23:26 Speaker 02 Oh, 100%. I see, well, because I work with professional tasters, I hear all the time memories that drive preferences, which I find really interesting. Like, people cannot divorce themselves from things like this is this tastes just like the bread I grew up with, or my grandmother used to make something that was just like this, or I had a medication, you know, the memories are such a force. And and
24:03 Speaker 02 You know, companies try to translate, you know, those, let's call them collective memories into terms like, just like homemade, or just like grandma used to bake. I find that interesting because with those memories sometimes comes very emotional reactions. Joy, you know, fear around medication. Oh, my gosh, I had this cherry flavor. It tastes like this Luden's cough drop that I had when I had scarlet fever. I mean, on and on and on. And it's, we can't, when you're talking about under the radar, there's, it's so embedded in us that sometimes we don't even know they're there until we taste
24:42 Speaker 02 that thing again. And it's like walking into a portal, or I call, I call it a time machine, right? Because we can't access them until we taste that thing again.
24:54 Mike Carruthers? Well, this is fun because it's a topic I think everybody thinks about, especially when they're eating, you know, why they like what they like, and they don't like that thing that other people seem to like. And I really enjoy hearing how you do your job and you can turn it on and off like that. I've been talking with Beth Kimmerle. She is a sensory science expert, founder of Attribute Analytics, and she's the author of a couple of books about sweets and chocolate. And I'll put a link to her chocolate book in the show notes. Thank you, Beth. This was great.
25:25 Speaker 02 Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for the great questions.
25:30 Speaker 00 Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.
25:58 Speaker 05 Born from the intensity of a night in the eternal city. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin and warm vanilla. Masculine leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at Macy's.com.
26:30 Mike Carruthers? Why does being a sports fan matter so much? For some people, it's not just entertainment, it's identity. They follow a team year after year. They know every player, every statistic. They wear the jerseys and the hats. They even talk about the team like they're part of it. They don't say "they won," they say "we won." Others don't latch on to teams so much, they follow individual athletes. Tennis players, golfers, fighters, and they ride every win and loss right along with them. So what is it about sports that turns spectators into loyal, emotionally invested fans? Why do we care so deeply about games played by people we've never met?
27:14 Mike Carruthers? And what does that say about how our brains are wired? Well, that's what my next guest studies. Aaron C.T. Smith is a professor of management at Newcastle Business School at the University of Newcastle, and he's author of a book called "The Psychology of Sports Fans." And he's here to explain why sports fandom is such a powerful and very human force. Hi, Aaron. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
27:40 Speaker 03 Thanks very much, Mike. Appreciate being on.
27:43 Mike Carruthers? So what is it about sports? What is it that drives people to become such loyal, devoted fans?
27:51 Speaker 03 People like me see a connection between sport as a kind of religion.
27:58 Speaker 03 And now, of course, we've been talking about sport as religion forever, but what's interesting now is that there's a a new series of evidence from fields like cognitive psychology and neuroscience. And it seems that the brain doesn't really care whether, you know, religion is supernatural or secular. You know, what happens in the brain during worship and during fandom are kind of similar. And it's because the brain's hardwired to believe. And it believes strongly to have, you know, strongest form of belief, of course, is faith. And the ability to have faith also means that sport gives us a kind of opportunity to lose ourselves in something bigger than us and experience
28:41 Speaker 03 what for many of us, I think, is really true belonging. And that, that might be one of the, I think, the greatest consolations for feeling a bit trivial in a world that's kind of easy to feel marginalized and inconsequential in. So for me, this isn't just about sport. It's really about the brain's need for faith to be connected to a tribe. Our search for meaning and, you know, sometimes that just happens to involve watching people chase a ball. I think that's why across human history and civilization, you know, sport's proven to be inevitable.
29:19 Mike Carruthers? One of the things that I find striking is it's one thing to be a fan of a team and, you know, wear the hat, wear the shirt and all that. But there are, there are also fans of teams who have this, hate's kind of a strong word, but they don't like other teams, like, you know, the Yankees and the Red Sox or the, you know, you know what I mean? It's, it's not only do I like this team, I really hate that team.
29:46 Speaker 03 Right, and that's connected directly, of course, to our sense of tribal identification. And it is amplified also by the nature of the way our brains work. We are connected to that tribal sense of association.
30:05 Speaker 03 And so it's not just sufficient for us to bond around our own team, but also bond around a common enemy. And so that sense of rivalry, you know, whether it's, you know, Duke and North Carolina, Army and Navy, or, and all of this is about what connects us to our team is also part of what disconnects us from other tribes and fans.
30:32 Mike Carruthers? I've always been curious why sports fans pick the sport they do and pick the team they do. I mean, I used to play baseball, Little League baseball, and so I was a very big baseball fan when I was younger, but I played the sport, so I kind of identified with the guys on the team. But my wife's a hockey fan, big Kings fan, but she's, she's never played hockey, she's never, but she, that's the sport that she gravitates to.
31:01 Speaker 03 The actual exposure to sports and our decisions to become fans of, of one team or another is not much of a decision, as it turns out, based on the research. For people of our generation, perhaps, and going back in the past, the biggest impact was our families, specifically our fathers. But the cultural connections to regions and areas in particular sports can often be quite tenuous. You know, it might have been a big brother or sister, it might have been an early exposure in order to create a social connection with a group we wanted to be part of.
31:44 Speaker 03 It might have been connected to a particular regional cultural affiliation with a certain sports, depending on where you grow up in the world. Today, it's changing though, of course, where young people today are not necessarily the same kinds of fans that older generations have been, which are fans for life. I mean, a good example is that, we know from research, fans are twice as likely to change their marriage partner as they are their sporting team allegiance, you know, over the course of their, their lifetimes. But what's beautiful about sport is that that love, you know, tends not to diminish, you know, unlike our romantic partners with whom we get bored.
32:25 Speaker 03 And it's part of it, that is because of all of the, not just psychological payoffs, but all of the neurochemical and hormonal responses that come because we feed the the brain's pleasure pathways as a consequence of indulging in sport. So in a sense, going back to your original question, it doesn't really matter who we support, it's the consequences of that support which give us the sense of belonging and the deeper meaning and our brains then come to the party by triggering a cascade and avalanche of what neuroscientists call happy hormones.
33:05 Mike Carruthers? One of the things that I notice is that that there's like a spectrum, right? There are people who who are diehard fans, they know all the stats, they know all the players, they know everything. At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who couldn't care less about sports. And then there are plenty of people in various points along the middle where they go to some of the games, they kind of follow it on TV. And I wonder why people are where they are on that spectrum.
33:37 Speaker 03 The jury's still out in terms of research about exactly whether certain individuals have a greater propensity for fandom. It appears that they might well be because of their desire for a strong identification. And it's also, it also appears that people become more strong in their identification when they need that psychological reward because that sense of identification leads to positive structure, meaning and community. And many fans do become deeper fans over time as they find that genuine lifelong friendship
34:18 Speaker 03 and emotional support and the sense of resilience that comes along with being part of a social identity with their community.
34:28 Speaker 03 As for why certain individuals gravitate towards certain teams and then forge the strength of relationship, probably has something to do with our need for two different and competing tensions. One is a desire, of course, to belong to something, to be part of something bigger. So we're all trying to be part of a tribe. But at the same time, we're also all trying to be distinctive and different. And sport gives us a way of doing that. So that within our social group, we can be important and respected. One of the ways you do that in sport is that you lean in and you become a stronger fan
35:10 Speaker 03 and you demonstrate your interest and your fanaticism by going that extra step through social sacrifice and commitment to the team. So what often happens is that some individuals find when they're seeking that sense of meaning, it's easy to lean in and to accumulate that sort of sense of respect through the experience of sport. But there's still some uncertainties here as well. I mean, for example, Mike, when we look at the research of individuals who get themselves into trouble at sport, whether it's through hooliganism or just yelling obscenities at officials.
35:54 Speaker 03 You might think that they're bad apples, but the reality turns out that they're everyday people who just seem to be finding a cathartic release through sport, sometimes going over the line. So it's an interesting revelation to discover that all of us can become diehard fans. And maybe you've had that experience where you've gone to two different kinds of sporting events with the same person. Maybe you go to golf or tennis and you're both quite restrained. And then you go to hockey or, you know, a highly intense fan experience. And, you know, you scream and you yell and you become completely different people depending on the context.
36:39 Mike Carruthers? But some people don't like sports at all. I mean, they just couldn't care less and don't even understand why others do. There's no need for them, for whatever reason, to seek out that tribe.
36:52 Speaker 03 No, there isn't, but what we discover is that all people have this need, this same need that's been yielded through sport. It can be through other experiences as well. And it just depends on your sort of cultural exposures as to whether that was important to you. What we do find, though, is that there's a very strong correlation between early life experiences in sport and ongoing fandom. In other words, if sport was good to you as a young person, then you tend to find that you're good to sport in the way back. So those of us who weren't very good at sport when we were younger or at school
37:34 Speaker 03 or in early settings don't tend to gravitate towards sport and move towards other ways of meeting those needs.
37:43 Mike Carruthers? There does seem to be a gender difference. I mean, if you look at the stands at a football game or a baseball game, I mean, there are plenty of women there, but the men seem to outnumber the women substantially at most sporting events. And why would that be?
38:01 Speaker 03 The probable reason is that testosterone amplifies a sense of tribal affiliation and aggression. So we dig deeper as men because we're driven through our hormonal system to get a stronger impact out of sport's sense of tribal belonging. We know, for example, that many experience greater hormonal changes while watching intense matches. Our stress hormones go through the roof when we watch intense matches by up to about 50%. In fact, research shows that cardiac events, that is, you know, heart attacks,
38:44 Speaker 03 spike by about a quarter in home fans during defeats. But that doesn't apply to women, so it only applies to men. So sport, in fact, can be dangerous for men in some situations.
38:58 Mike Carruthers? Well, and the other thing that I find interesting, and it really obviously relates to the tribal thing that you're talking about, is, you know, to watch a game, to watch a baseball game or a football game, you get more information and you understand the game better if you watch it at home. I mean, you get the stats put up and the commentator tells you why and what happened. But people like to go to the game because that's a whole different experience. It's not the best way to see the game, but it's the best way to maybe experience the, whatever that is, the phenomenon of the game.
39:35 Speaker 03 In a strange way, you know, we're addicted to sport and that crowd environment, because it gives us this incredible sense of belonging and connection to the people around us, we also get this outcome in terms of bonding and trust and affection through sport. It connects us to the team in a way where we can no longer differentiate, in an unconscious sense, us and the team. We are part of this collective sense of identity. And meanwhile, our brains are in on the action. You know, all of that euphoria, the neurochemicals, the
40:14 Speaker 03 dopamine creates this incredible concentration that's, even in, some of the research suggests that those crowd-like situations can create a kind of brainwave synchrony, where our brainwaves come into a kind of flow state that leads to a greater memory imprinting. Neuroscientists call this a hippocampal imprinting, which means that all those euphoric experiences get then linked to meaning over time. And this, of course, is exactly the way we work. You know, we talk about this, you know, those great sport experiences that we had.
40:54 Mike Carruthers? My perception is that most big sports fans have like a favorite, like they're a baseball fan mostly and they like the Dodgers, but they also follow the Lakers and maybe, you know, another team. But there's one dominant sport for them. Is my perception true or is it just my perception?
41:19 Speaker 03 No, your perception is exactly right. That's borne out in research. We tend to have one particular favorite club or team or association, or sometimes athlete. It depends on the sport a little bit. For example, NFL fans are very much connected to a particular, to the team itself and that sense of identity. NFL fans have the highest level of loyalty in terms of never missing a game, whereas NBA fans are more connected to the athletes and players themselves. So it's possible that what you can have is, you know, one preferred club or team, but at the same time have a couple of players that you follow as well.
42:05 Mike Carruthers? In cases where the sport itself is not about a team, but it's about individuals, golf, tennis, those kind of things. So when a Tiger Woods comes along, it seems like there are more people into golf because of him. And then when he fades away, what happens to those people? Do they latch on to another golfer? Or was their connection to golf so Tiger Woodsy that when he's gone, I'm gone?
42:37 Speaker 03 That's a brilliant question. It appears that for most of those individuals, there's something about the particular player themselves that forges a sense of resonance or, you know, narrative. There's just something, some angle, some connection. And that is what connects the fan to the sport is via the player. And so when that player perhaps concludes their winning run, or retires, or even in some instances, leaves the sport altogether, there tends to be a significant drop off to that sport. So it's connected through the individual themselves.
43:23 Mike Carruthers? Has this whole thing of fandom and everything you've been talking about, does it go back real far? Is this a relatively recent thing that maybe life in earlier times on earth was so perilous that we didn't have time for being a sports fan? Or not?
43:44 Speaker 03 That's an interesting question. We have evidence going right back to
43:49 Speaker 03 well, seven seventy six B C with the first Olympics, that there were fans of athletes in those times. And we've seen, we've got historical examples of play becoming sportlike throughout history. I mentioned earlier, and it wasn't entirely tongue in cheek to say that across human history and civilization, sport's been inevitable. It, sport has proven to be a cultural universal in every historical civilization across the globe. For as long as we've recorded history, there's evidence that sport and organized play has been present
44:29 Speaker 03 and that in order to, for that play to propagate, there's been fans. And so it's, it's become codified in a way where there are rules. And you know, as you know, now, our rulemaking is quite extraordinary, our ability to, you know, create all of these codification and rules.
44:49 Mike Carruthers? So I've, I've noticed over the, the past several years, that not only do people like sports, but there is, there are so many shows on T V that talk about sports, that, that you could watch on, you know, various streaming services and on regular television, that it's not just the sport anymore, it's the talking about the sport has become its own sport and analyzing it and talking about statistics and comparing players is, is its whole, it's a whole other thing.
45:20 Speaker 03 Yes, well, it's, I mean, fandom is, is part of an entire social ecosystem, of course. And that same sense of identity fusion that produces our interest in sport can also then become part of our co-creation of meaning, the way in which we experience life and, and receive interest and satisfaction from it.
45:44 Speaker 03 And because we we become so knowledgeable about sport, we we need to consume it. And that's also connected to our sense of that neural reward system, that addiction we have from sport, the this, the dopamine connection. So just being that constant exposure to sport gives us a a content that allows us to continually feel good. So it's it's also part of the anticipation that comes with sport. So it's not just about the consumption, it's about anticipating that consumption, which is incredibly powerful in terms of the way that we feel about ourselves and the way we regulate our emotional patterns.
46:29 Speaker 03 And of course, you the one, you know, the great thing about sport, of course, is that there's always next season. So there's always the next game, there's always the next thing that we can think about and hope for the best. There's always hope.
46:41 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, that's the great thing about sports. Well, tomorrow's another day, there's another game.
46:46 Speaker 03 Tomorrow, yes, exactly.
46:48 Mike Carruthers? Well, I think clearly sports fans themselves are interested in the world of fandom and and how it all works, but maybe even more importantly, are people who aren't sports fans who are baffled and fascinated by the whole thing. I've been talking with Aaron C T Smith, who is a professor of management at Newcastle Business School at the University of Newcastle, and he's author of the book, The Psychology of Sports Fans, and there's a link to that book in the show notes. Aaron, thank you. Thanks for explaining all this.
47:19 Speaker 03 Thank you so much for having me on the show, Mark. I appreciate it. Thank you.
47:26 Mike Carruthers? Who would you say wakes up grumpier, men or women? Well, it turns out it's women. Women are grumpier in the morning than men are. That's because sleep or lack of sleep has a much bigger impact on women than men, both mentally and physically. The study from Duke University woke up both men and women and determined that women experienced more anger, depression, and anxiety in the morning if they didn't get enough sleep. Sleep experts say that women need about 20 more minutes of sleep than men do. The primary function of sleep is to give the brain some downtime, and because women tend to multitask more than men, they'll need some more shut-eye to recover.
48:11 Mike Carruthers? And that is something you should know. You know, the podcasting world is pretty competitive. There are lots of podcasts to listen to, which is why we always appreciate your help in spreading the word about this podcast and telling people about it and asking them to give it a listen. It's easy to share it, just use the share function on the player you're listening on right now. I'm Mike Herrothers, thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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