bloggedy blog

:: Monday, April 19, 2004 ::

Why we're sports fans
A gaggle of sports psychologists and sociologists, including my friend and UMR faculty member Christian End, make a living trying to figure out what makes sports fans tick.

On a corner of his desk in the psychology department at the University of Missouri-Rolla, Christian End keeps a framed photograph of his niece and nephew, both decked out in Green Bay Packers garb.

The boy, barely a year old, wears a Brett Favre jersey. The girl, all of 3 months old, is dressed as the tiniest of Packers cheerleaders.

"I'm sure they didn't pick that stuff out themselves," End says, chuckling. "You think maybe they'll grow up to be Packers fans?"

End is sure they will, not only because uncles know this sort of thing, but because, armed with a doctorate in psychology, he has chosen the study of such motivational matters as his niche. His master's thesis looked at the way winning and losing affected NFL fans' Internet habits. His doctoral thesis addressed the way fans responded to threats to their "social identity."

Like many researchers, End can tell you with reasonable certainty that the bond between many of the most loyal fans and their favorite teams is forged during childhood, that they are socialized into following the Packers or the Cubs or the Canadiens in the same way that they are socialized into their family's religion, and that they are likely to carry those embedded habits all the way to the big sports bar in the sky.

Sociologists and psychologists also can tell you why some people follow sports with more passion than others; why most will jump off a bandwagon even more readily than they climbed on; why people who have never been west of the Mississippi will latch onto the Oakland Raiders rather than to a team that's two hours away; and why the promise of Florida and Arizona turned out to be a sports marketing mirage. Full story

:: Andrew 08:50 + ::
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