Is the behavior of sports fans explainable?

 (Aaron Rodgers, quarterback of the world champion Green Bay Packers.  Hang out with this guy to really enhance your status.)

I warned you in my first blog about 18 months ago that we would eventually get to some gritty topics about human behavior.  Up to now, we have been mostly just messing around with the humorous aspects of the human condition.  But I want to tackle some fascinating elements of our species (at least they are fascinating to me, and this is my blog, and you are not the boss of me).  And although I am not a professional card-carrying behavioral ecologist, or sociobiologist, or evolutionary psychologist, I have followed this literature for nearly 40 years.  It is about the most interesting non-fiction reading there is, in my opinion.

My closest colleague at Cornell, Paul Sherman, does carry a valid card of the type listed above, and I have been strongly influenced by his thinking.  He proved to me that asking questions about animal behavior (humans are animals) and then posing possible answers by thinking about how natural selection works can be productive and stimulating.  I think it is a fun type of thought experiment.

I have been in wonderment for decades about the motivation of those who so passionately root for and idolize their favorite football or baseball team.  I just don't get it.  Sure, I supported my teams in high school, and hoped they would win the regional or state tournaments.  I wanted the football team to win rather than lose when I attended Ohio State University.  But as those years passed, I found that I couldn't care less if any particular team won or lost and, in fact, I got to the point where I can't stand to watch any sports on tv.  So I am naturally curious about this conspicuous human behavior displayed by tens of millions of people worldwide, and which enables a relative handful of star athletes to become famous and fabulously wealthy.

In particular, it is curious how a person can become so emotionally vested in a team on which you have never been a player, or excited about the outcome of a team from a school you never attended, or remain overtly loyal to a team from a city in which you have never even lived.  To a behavioral ecologist, this is all extremely interesting.  (Realize that this little essay is not about the person who loves the game of baseball or football or basketball so much that they could watch any two teams play and love every minute of it, and not even care who wins.)

I don't have a lot of data on which to build a little theory about this fascinating behavior of humans, but there are some observations about which we can probably all agree.  Here they are:

1.  the majority of fans that follow most teams are men; most of the most passionate fans are men

2.  the most avid male fans are of prime reproductive age (15-50)

3.  the passion is so elevated that in many (or most ??) cases, fans of one team literally hate other teams and/or hate the fans of opposing teams, hurl incredibly insulting epithets at them, etc. (for spine-chilling evidence of this, check out the numerous Facebook fan pages of sports teams, but don't let your young children read them)

4.  in many (or most ???) cases, fans advertise their commitment to their favorite team by wearing jerseys, jackets, ball caps, or belt buckles, and put team bumper stickers on their car

This behavior is interesting, because we ecologists are always analyzing what organisms do in terms of cost-benefit analysis.  So in this case, how do fans benefit from supporting their favorite team?  They must get more than it costs them in terms of time and money, or it seems unlikely they would continue their support?  Aside from the fan who bets money on the outcome of a game, most fans stand to receive no immediate material benefit from their team doing well.  So where is the reward?

Now, most of you are not students of natural selection, I assume.  So, you are probably saying that people follow their teams because "it feels good", "it is enjoyable", or "I feel a sense of pride when my team does well". But the behaviorist wants to know why it feels good.  If it is enjoyable, then it almost certainly serves some other purpose biologically.  Why do we like sugar?  Because it is sweet.  But biologists then ask why does it taste sweet?  The biological answer is that it tastes good to us (and probably to most mammals) so that we will seek it out and ingest certain foods that contribute to our nutritional well-being and, thus, our survival.  The same kind of answer follows the question about why sex feels good.  If sex were painful, humans would have intercourse less often and, presumably, have fewer children on average compared to a group of humans where the act was pleasurable.  I am simply asking the same question about why so many humans follow their favorite sports teams so passionately.

At this point, I need to introduce the concept of "status", which has a special meaning in biology.  There are many factors that can contribute to an elevated status in humans: wealth, notoriety, physical beauty, intellectual acumen, physical prowess.  Status is important, especially for males, because females are attracted to men with high status.  High status males have more mates during their life, copulate more, and leave more children (or at least they did before the era of easy access to contraceptives in developed societies), which is the all-important currency that drives evolution.  Thousands of scientific studies show this relationship for non-human animals.  The data for humans are more difficult to obtain, but if you search Google for scientific studies by P.W. Turke and L.L. Betzig 1985 (Those who can do: Wealth, status, and reproductive success on Ifaluk), E.A. Smith 2004 (Why do good hunters have higher reproductive success?), or R.L. Hopcroft 2006 (Sex, status and reproductive success in contemporary United States), you will find convincing evidence that status matters a great deal to humans.  But you already know that status is important to humans, and that we try to raise ours all the time.  This is true of humans in every culture and society everywhere in the world.  And if I asked you why we seek status, you would probably say something like "because it feels good".

There is little doubt that professional athletes have high status.  The Super Bowl that I watched Sunday exhibited some of the elements that contribute to the status of the participants, aside from the obvious financial payoff.  The President of the United States watched the game at home, and a former President was in attendance at the game along with numerous high-status movie stars.  Then, there is the presence of the U.S. military, which I have never understood.  Regardless of how that association ever got started, the military pageantry just before the game, the singing of the National Anthem, the military fly-over, and the segues to our soldiers in Iraq who watched the game lend credence to this football game as an important event in America.  That is, the Super Bowl is a really big deal, watched by more than 100 million viewers.  As Michael Douglas stated in that somewhat emotional segment before the kickoff, "This is so much bigger than just a football game."  If you think that the "head man" or chief of a Paleolithic village of a couple hundred people had high status among his villagers, then the status of the quarterback of the winning Super Bowl team must be off the charts.

What then about the fans?  I have long thought that the idolization of celebrities that is so common among humans is a status-enhancing behavior.  Or, at least it is a behavior that is a vestige of an age-old desire to be close to the source of power, wisdom, or wealth.  Perquisites that enhanced survival and/or reproductive success must have flowed to those who were confidants of the clan or tribe's chief throughout most of human history.  Today, if I were a close friend of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or the Queen of England, I would likely obtain some tangible benefits.

And so we are strongly attracted to famous, wealthy, and powerful people, even if it is from afar.  We celebrate them, idolize them, dream about being with them or at least seen with them-------of somehow having our lives and our fortunes touched by theirs.  To help prove this point, imagine that you flew from New York to LA, and you happened to sit next to Angelina Jolie on the plane.  I will bet you my next three Social Security checks that the first words out of your mouth when you joined your spouse or friend at the terminal would be: "Guess who I sat next to on the plane?"  It would probably be the most significant event that happens to you all month, and you would talk about it with whomever would listen.  Importantly, your status would be enhanced, at least for a little while, because of this experience you had with the famous celebrity.

We may not be conscious of the possible enhancements to our well-being if we were to be befriended by one of these high-profile people, but that lack of awareness does not lessen the potential benefits of such an association.  Anyone with higher status than ours is a person with whom it is worth fraternizing, so in a global world the number of such people is extremely high.

It should be obvious by now that my hypothesis is that our tendency to follow a sports team, and to advertise that fact to others, is just another example of attempting to enhance one's social status.  It is a cheap and easy tactic to use; being a sports fan is the poor man's approach to bettering your position.  But there are certainly other explanations for this behavior.  For example, maybe people (essentially men) become a visible fan of a team because nearly everyone else in their social group or community is already a fan.  By NOT being on board, you could be viewed as a weirdo and, of course, your status would suffer accordingly.  But that is essentially the same idea; namely, maybe your status will not soar because you became a fan, but it might decline if you do not.

I have not discussed how we might test this idea or other predictions we could make based on it, but this blog is already too long.  Another time. I could be dead wrong about all of this, and I strongly invite your alternative explanations.  However, as I have long believed, the wrong hypothesis is better than no hypothesis at all.

The Odd Couple goes West

(DrTom and Paul Sherman could have played the parts of Oscar and Felix naturally, and did.)

Paul Sherman and I were colleagues at Cornell University.  For several years, Paul and I drove the 2,200 miles from Ithaca, NY to the OX Ranch in western Idaho to conduct research on Idaho ground squirrels. We lived there for two months a year for most of the 1990s. Have you ever spent four days in a truck with Paul Sherman, followed by two months in a bunkhouse 30 miles from the nearest town (pop., about 600), followed by another four days in the truck to get home? Of course not, because your mama didn't raise no fool. Apparently, mine did.

On the trip out, Paul enjoyed working mentally on evolutionary problems---aloud.  Why do opossums play dead?  Why do humans nearly everywhere believe in some kind of a god?  Why do humans keep pets?  Paul liked to listen to Linda Ronstadt tapes in the truck; I liked to hear Jon Secada. He drove 55 mph; I drove 65. He liked to eat at McDonald's; I hated the place. I smoked; he hated that. He is fastidious, organized and neat; I'm not so much that way. He has a Type A personality, if you know what I mean; my type is yet undefined, but it can't be higher than a C.  And Sherm worried a lot more than I did about what other people thought.

When we arrived at the bunkhouse at the OX in March of the first year, I threw my jacket on the chair near the front door as we entered the old clapboard structure. Paul asked me if I was going to do something with that. I told him I intended to leave it there until May when we packed up to go back to New York.  And so it went for the next 55 days, and for the next eight years---Sherman as Felix Unger and I as Oscar Madison of the old tv series, The Odd Couple.

When friends or biologists visited our squirrel project, they invariably asked if we bickered like this all the time. No, we've cleaned up our act quite a bit for your visit. You should have heard us yesterday arguing about whether the kitchen floor needed mopping yet. And the day before that it was whether ketchup really needs to be kept in a refrigerator. Of course not, I said. But I repeatedly found it in there getting all cold as soon as I turned my back.  And Tony Randall worried whenever I left the Crock-Pot on all day. "Paul, it is a crock-pot. That's what it does. You cook slowly with it on ALL DAY." And tomorrow, we have to decide who drives the 30 miles to town to get groceries. And whose turn is it to call the ranch foreman and invite him and his wife for dinner?  "Tom, isn't that firewood a little close to the wood stove?" I started going to bed at 8pm so I could get some peace and quiet.  "Tom, did you brush your teeth before you went to bed?"  Judas Priest!!!!

One year we decided to take a more northerly route back to Ithaca.  We went through Montana.  At the end of a long day of traveling, we were ready to stop for the night.  We were both exhausted from a day of negotiating about the best route to take, which octane gas we should buy, and who gets to read the Missoulian first while the other drove.  I detected the unmistakable smell of testosterone as we hit the city limits of Bozeman; a few minutes later we discovered why.  We noticed that there were few vacancies at motels as we proceeded down the main drag.  We stopped at the only place that did not have a "No Vacancy" sign flashing.  That was the good news.  There was a rodeo in town, and nearly every room in town was taken.  The only room they had left was the honeymoon suite, the bad news.  I kid you not!  The friggin honeymoon suite.

The middle-aged woman behind the counter snickered and told me with as straight a face as she could summon that she would give us a discount.   The lobby was full of cowboys in western shirts, huge metal belt buckles with bighorn sheep and other animal heads on them, wide-brimmed hats curved up at the edges just right, and the obligatory boots with stiletto toes.  There was probably more testosterone per cubic foot in that motel at that moment than any place on earth.  "Lady, please keep your voice down.  We're considering this because we are dead tired, but let's not let this develop into a group decision between the university profs who study squirrels and have New York license plates and all these hombres who just rode in here on wild mustangs they only roped this morning on the open range."  Agreed.  But as we were walking away from the check-in desk she shouted: "Do you want flowers sent to the room?"  

Sherman and I accepted the deal, but we took a circuitous route to get to the room, and then waited until the hall cleared before we unlocked the door and slipped inside faster than a Google search can bring up the results for "lynch mob". The room was much nicer than the room my wife and I had stayed in on our wedding night 40 years earlier; there must be some kind of moral or life lesson in that fact, but I can't begin to figure out what it is.  The Bozeman room was so feminine, so flowery, so over-the-top nuptial that I blurred the memory of the place almost as soon as we checked out.  I do remember that there was a heart-shaped bed on a raised platform in the middle of the room and a pull-out couch.  Sherman and I flipped to see who got the bed.  He won the toss, or lost the toss, depending on your point of view.  We both agreed not to discuss the incident for at least 10 years.

Back in Ithaca, Sherman and I rarely spent any social time together.  An occasional email or phone call where the words "dickhead" and "whacko" were flung about was the extent of it.  Living together for two months a year pretty much exhausted what we had to say to one another.  During those years, we discussed every topic known to man, and we pretty much solved all the world's problems.  Professors in biology are often loners, so to live and work together closely for a significant period of time, far removed from your families and routine concerns, fosters a mutual dependency.  When it was all said and done, we were both wiser for the rare opportunity that comes with two adults jointly seeking answers to questions on a daily basis.  It takes a compromising spirit, but in the end it was all good, and life-long memories were made.  I still think that ketchup should be kept at room temperature, however.

The incredible cinnamon buns of Frank the cowboy

(Frank Anderson, my favorite cowboy and pastry chef, on his favorite quarter horse, Magic.)

Frank Anderson is a cowboy.  I mean, he is a real cowboy.  Frank and his family used to run cattle in the wide open landscape of eastern Oregon.  They were out on the range for weeks at a time, ate from a chuck wagon, punched cattle from horseback---the whole nine yards.  Years later, when his kids attended a proper school for the first time in their lives in Eugene, the teacher called Frank and his wife in for a conference.  She told them that their kids were great.  So what's the problem?  Well, they tell these unbelievable stories about living on the range like the cowboys of old.  The teacher quipped: "No one has lived like that for 100 years."  But Frank snapped back: "Mam.  That is exactly how we lived."

I got to know Frank while he was working for the OX Ranch near Council, Idaho.  For many years during the 1990s, Paul Sherman and I drove from Cornell to the OX where we conducted research on Idaho ground squirrels for two months every spring.  The OX was an operating cattle ranch with only a couple of full-time cowboys; with the well-trained cattle dogs they used, you just didn't need many men to keep those cattle from misbehaving.  Frank was in his 60s then, but he still mounted a horse early in the morning and didn't get off until evening.  Sometimes he had to sleep on the ground in the early spring cold, rather than take the time to come back to the house, if the herd was far away.  In the morning after those nights, he didn't walk completely upright.

Frank is built like most men would like to be built who were 40 years his junior.  Probably about 5'10" tall, 200 pounds, not an ounce of fat.  He sports a huge handlebar moustache, bushy eyebrows that he can raise so high they knock off his cowboy hat, and a flattop haircut.  He could easily pass for a Marine Corps drill instructor at Parris Island.  He is a horse whisperer and a dog whisperer.  He owns a team of four Belgians that he used to pull a wagon.  It is no small feat to control 8,000 pounds of horse with four independent brains, but Frank used to enter competitions with his "boys" where you did just that.  His son actually "breaks" horses for a living.  Once when Frank was driving fence posts into the ground he lost the tip of his index finger to the first joint.  He politely produced the severed finger from his pocket to the doctor when he finally got to the medical office.

But on Sundays, Frank transforms into something else.  He is usually home that day, and he bakes.  He made fantastic pies when we worked on the ranch.  One Sunday, I entered Frank's kitchen to find a plate of the most delicious-looking cinnamon buns you ever saw.  They were huge, tipping the scales at about half a pound each, oozing with cinnamon-flavored gooeyness, and warm.  In my entire pastry-consuming life, I never tasted a cinnamon bun that was that good, and I consider myself a cinnamon bun aficionado.  I was astonished at Frank's accomplishment, I ranted and raved about the creation, and I praised the cowboy profusely.  He nodded with pride and modest self-satisfaction.

My son Matt, who was working with me at the time, whispered to me that we need to trap squirrels in the location of Frank's house every Sunday, especially on the side of the house where Frank can see us through a large picture window, and that we should look hungry and in need of hot coffee.  We agreed that we would rehearse the forlorn look of a hungry squirrel biologist that very night back at our bunkhouse.  After a few Sundays, Sherman began to see the pattern, and accused us of planning our research schedule around the activities of the cowboy's kitchen.

When we returned to Ithaca, I told everyone about the cowboy's buns.  I bragged to my wife, I exclaimed to my department chairman, and I repeated the story of the Most Excellent Cinnamon Buns to my students and to anyone who would listen.  The following year we went back to the OX to study the wily ground squirrel.  On Sundays, I trapped near Frank's house.  I was hoping to score again.  Apple pie was good, but those buns.................  Had it all been just a wonderful dream?

And then one Sunday it happened.  Frank had cinnamon buns!  But wait.  They were good, but not great.  Was Frank slipping?  Had he lost the original recipe?  Had he changed ovens or mixers?  Was he using a metal spoon now instead of a wooden one?  And the following year, it was the same.  Good buns, but not great buns.

A few years after this, when our squirrel project was over, Frank visited my wife and I in Ithaca.  And then the truth came out.  The old cowboy confessed.  The wonderful cinnamon buns that I remembered were not Frank's.  He had purchased them at a local church bake sale a few days before.  When Matt and I went bonkers over how good they were, and how amazed we were that the cattle-puncher could produce such a thing, Frank took the credit.  The whole story took on a life of its own.  Frank heard us tell his foreman what great buns his employee made.  His culinary reputation throughout western Idaho was growing far and wide, as well as through the halls of the Ivy League back East.  Frank let the acclaim get the better of him, his head swelled to the size of a 10-gallon hat.  After that inaugural bun year, Frank knew that we would be expecting those pastries, so he learned how to make cinnamon buns in an attempt to create a seamless bun history.  The "good" buns were his.  The "great" buns came from the bake sale.  And he hoped we would not know the difference.  OMG!

After his confession, I thought I would never trust any cowboy I met again.  To be honest, I have not met another cowboy in the 15 years since this incident, but if I ever meet one, he will have to prove himself to me.  But then, I cogitated the facts of this case a bit longer and I realized something.  Frank knew we were counting on having cinnamon buns at his house on Sunday.  So he took the time to learn how to make them.  He realized he now had a bun reputation to uphold, and a man's reputation was worth fighting over.  In fact, where Frank comes from, men used to shoot each other over such things not so long ago.  So in the end, I thought--bravo Frank.  Well done.  May the memory of your buns live forever.

P.S.  Sadly, Frank passed away in 2015.  My sons and I will miss him forever.

Paul Sherman's lesson on giving credit where credit is due

(Professor Paul W. Sherman lecturing DrTom once again about giving credit where credit is due.)

I was reminded by my old friend Paul Sherman just today, that I need to make sure I credit those whose ideas I use in these blogs (P.S. Sherman, pers.comm., 12/10/09).  I was always told to give credit where credit is due (R.P. Gavin (father), summer 1955).  I learned to cite references properly a long time ago (Mrs. S. Gingerich (high school English teacher), fall 1963).  I have always believed that we should do what we would like others to do to us (Christian Bible, spring, long time ago).  So from now on, I am turning over a new leaf (Acer rubrum, Linnaeus), and I will not forsake anyone who contributed an idea, or a dime (Philadelphia mint, Ben Franklin, 1778), to making my blogging (= weblog, and from Wikipedia, "The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.  Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.") a success.