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teams
(the more loosely defined kind that involve cooperating with others for any goal)
Left to right: Interfoto/Alamy, Action Plus Sports Images/Alamy (2)
are the human race’s key weapon in the fight for survival. ner, Barack Obama, stayed steady. Much as politicians love sports metaphors, these two forms of peaceful contest don’t seem to move fans in the same way.) Of course, researchers’ measurements of hormones in saliva samples would be of purely academic interest if they didn’t correlate with changes in behavior. But researchers lately have found that sports matches have a big impact on observers’ states of mind, and their actions, both as individuals and as a group. Last year’s Vancouver riots after the Boston Bruins’ upset victory in the Stanley Cup may be a textbook case. Researchers have found that violence spikes in communities that host intense sports matches, and upset victories are associated with the biggest jumps in violent behavior. In one study, economists Daniel I. Rees and Kevin T. Schnepel of the University of Colorado matched crime statistics with information about Division I-A college football games and found that game days were associated with jumps in arrests for assault, vandalism, disorderly conduct and alcohol offenses in host cities or towns. The sharpest rises came after upsets, they report. Similarly, University of California San Diego economists David Card and Gordon Dahl used data on domestic violence on Sundays during the N.F.L. football season to find that upset losses by a city’s team correlated with an average 8 percent increase in reports of male-on-female “intimate partner” violence. When the home team was playing a traditional rival or vying for a playoff spot, losses were followed by much bigger jumps in domestic-abuse arrests. In similar work, economists Stacy Wood, Melayne McInnes and David Norton recently looked at the aftermath of 271 college and professional basketball games between 2001 and 2008 that either decided playoff status or involved longtime rivals — in other words, games that mattered a great deal to fans. When the final scores were close, the researchers found, fatal traffic accidents increased in the winning team’s hometown (and, when it was a different place, in the immediate vicinity of the match). Since the deadly crashes only increased in places where there were fans of the winners, Wood and her co-authors believe the accidents stem from a surge of excitement (and probably testosterone) triggered by the closeness of the game. The recent work on the aftermath of games isn’t all about beatings and crashes. Some effects of an exciting game are positive, at least for some people. Incumbent politicians, for
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example, are probably right to want to associate themselves with winning teams. When a good thing (like a championship) arrives to make us feel good about our group, the leader gets some unconscious credit. Recently Neal Malhotra of the Stanford business school and his colleagues compared major-election voting results in 62 counties from 1964 to 2008 with the wins and losses scored by those counties’ Division I college football teams. When a home team won within 10 days of an election, the researchers found, incumbents got a boost at the ballot. In fact, the researchers calculate that such a victory gives the incumbent senator, governor or president an extra 1.6 percent of the vote. The authors also surveyed some 3,000 people during the 2009 N.C.A.A. college basketball tournament about their team preferences and their political views. Basketball fans whose favorite team had just won a game gave President Obama a favorability rating that averaged 2.3 percent more than others’ ratings.
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here’s a good evolutionary reason for us to be so passionate about our teams that their fortunes can change the way we feel about life, not to mention how we drive, vote and obey the law. Teams (the kind with jerseys and cheerleaders) matter so much to us because teams (the more loosely defined kind that involve cooperating with others for any goal) are the human race’s key weapon in the fight for survival. Stacked up against a tiger, elephant or eagle, an individual human is a poor competitor — no claws, no tusks, no wings. Only teamwork — our ability to cooperate with each other — gives us an edge against other creatures. That being so, perhaps the sight of teamwork gives us pleasure for its own sake. It could be that we like to see teams in action for the same reason we like to see trees and grass — because both sights signaled a safe environment to our ancestors. A well-functioning team never fails to interest us, and often, to make us wonder if it’s with us or against us. Certainly we often speak about giant collections of people as if they were single individuals — as in “Facebook won’t sit on its laurels” or “Iran wants a nuclear weapon” or “Dallas is hungry for a win.” As the psychologist and philosopher Donald T. Campbell has noted, the more such a collection of people resembles a finely honed team, the easier it is for the mind to see it as one thing. When we see people who are physically close together,
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