Why are Americans addicted to baseball? An empirical analysis of fandom in Korea and the United States

Contemporary Economic Policy, Jan, 2008 by Young H. Lee, Trenton G. Smith

Before delving into the question of what testosterone tells us about competitive behavior, it is worth asking what it has to do with sports fans. As it turns out, sports fans respond to wins and losses much the same as the athletes themselves: avid fans watching a basketball game, for instance, exhibit higher self-esteem (as measured by subsequent self-evaluation of performance on an unrelated task) after a win than after a loss (Hirt et al., 1992), and the testosterone levels of basketball and soccer fans have been shown to increase after a win and decrease after a loss (Bernhardt et al., 1998). Indeed, even imagined success at competitive tasks can have a demonstrable effect on testosterone levels (Schultheiss, Campbell, and McClelland, 1999). It might seem illogical for a spectator watching a competition--the outcome of which he cannot control, involving players he is unlikely ever to meet--to react with very real physiological adaptation and personal attribution. But this sort of irrationality is in fact a hallmark of evolved behaviors: because humans evolved in a world without television and anonymous or one-time interactions, we behave as if the characters in soap operas (who, it is worth noting, are not shy about revealing intimate personal details) were intimate friends, just as we behave as if the pitcher in the World Series can hear us when we shout at his image on the screen (Eastman and Riggs, 1994; O'Guinn and Shrum, 1997).

A common misconception holds that men with high testosterone levels are aggressive. A more nuanced view is that those with high testosterone levels are less apt to back down from a challenge. In some populations (e.g., prison inmates) where challenges are common, positive correlations between aggression and testosterone have been observed (Dabbs et al., 1995), but men with high testosterone levels in general are no more likely than other men to wind up in prison and can be found in professions ranging from actor to trial lawyer to politician (Dabbs, 1992). More importantly, the response of testosterone levels to competition appears to be a function of perceived causation: increases in testosterone after a win, for instance, are greater when the victor views his performance positively and attributes the outcome to personal effort (Booth et al., 1989; Gonzalez-Bono et al., 2000; Serrano et al., 2000). This evidence, taken together, seems to suggest that testosterone is in some sense an (unconscious) internal barometer of one's likelihood of success in future conflicts. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that testosterone appears to simultaneously prepare us for such conflicts, not just by stimulating the growth of skeletal muscles but also by increasing our self-confidence and ability to focus on the task at hand (Knickmeyer et al., 2005).

So we have the beginnings of a naturalistic theory of the sports fan: humans have a universal tendency to form and join coalitions or groups; this tendency is a product of our natural history of intergroup conflict; and fans appear (if subconsciously) to react to competitive outcomes much as athletes do, as evidenced by the many parallels in psychological and neuroendocrine (testosterone) measures. It remains to be established that the state of being a sports fan is (or might be expected to be) habit forming, in the sense that the marginal utility of fandom increases over time. This is the subject of the next section.