Speaking of Psychology: The psychology of sports fans, with Daniel Wann, PhD

Are you a sports superfan? Or do you wonder what’s driving the superfans in your life? Daniel Wann, PhD, of Murray State University, talks about why being a fan is usually good for people’s mental health, how they choose the teams they root for, why some are fair-weather fans while others love to cheer for the underdog, how fandom is changing among younger people, and whether a crowd of supportive fans can affect the outcome of a game.

Daniel Wann, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Murray State University. His research program centers on the psychology of sport fandom, in particular the causes and consequences of sport team identification (i.e., the extent to which a fan feels a psychological connection to a team). Currently, he’s investigating fan/spectator aggression, the psychological well-being of fans, the strategies used by fans to cope with their team’s poor performance, behavioral loyalty (e.g., attendance), fan superstitions, and the socialization of sport fans.

Kim Mills: Speaking of Psychology is taking a summer break, so we’re rerunning some of our favorite episodes from the past. In 2024, I talked to psychologist Daniel Wann about sports fandom. What drives sports superfans, why are some people fair-weather fans while others love to root for the underdog, and whether a crowd of supportive fans can affect the outcome of a game. I hope you enjoy this episode from the archives. We’ll be back with new episodes beginning August 26th.

This year, more than 120 million Americans watched the Super Bowl on television, the biggest single network telecast audience in history. Okay, some of those viewers might have tuned in to see Taylor Swift, but a lot of them were there for the football.

Almost 40% of Americans say that they follow sports somewhat or very closely, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center poll. And about 7% of them are superfans who follow sports extremely closely and talk about sports every day. You might know some of those superfans, or maybe you’re one yourself.

So whether it’s college sports, the NFL, the WNBA or Major League Baseball, what drives sports fans to become so passionately attached to their teams? Is being a fan good for your mental health, even when your team is losing? Why are some people fair-weather fans, while others love to root for the underdog? What about aggression among sports fans? Why do some fans behave badly? Can playing in front of a big supportive crowd of fans actually affect a team’s performance? In other words, is there really a home-field advantage?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Dan Wann, a distinguished professor and the department of psychology at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. He’s been studying the psychology of sports fans and spectators since the mid-1980s with a particular interest in fans’ psychological connection to their teams. He’s the author of more than 200 journal articles and multiple books, including Sport Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Fandom. His work has been covered by major media outlets including ESPN, Time magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Sports Illustrated. Dr. Wann is a research fellow in the Sport Marketing Association and has won many awards for his research and teaching. 

Dr. Wann, thank you for joining me today.

Daniel Wann, PhD: Absolutely. My pleasure to be here.

Mills: So let’s start with the big question. Why do people become sports fans? What drives their intense attachment to a sport or a particular team? Or even an individual player?

Wann: Yeah, so oftentimes that’s the $2-million question, right, and anytime you have a $2-million question, you can end up with about 2 million different answers. So I think that given the time constraints that we might have—I actually teach an entire course on the sport fan psychology that we spend 4 months talking about this—but I think that a pretty straightforward answer would be to say that one thing that we know that sport fandom does is it really does help individuals meet basic psychological needs. That sure, you can say that okay, so-and-so follows sports because well it’s fun or because maybe it provides an escape from the stress of life or the boredom of their life, or maybe in some way they enjoy the aesthetics of it, the beauty and the grace and the artistic nature that come with some sport events.

But really what we’ve learned in the past about decade is we’ve sort of undersold ourselves in terms of the psychology of sport fandom, and it really does mean more than what we had previously thought. Some examples that I can come up with pretty quickly here would be, for example, by being a fan of a particular team or a sport or even a player, it gives that individual the opportunity to feel a sense of belongingness. We are very social creatures. Affiliation is certainly born in us through evolution, and one thing that fandom allows people to do is to get in a part of these groups. I mean, if you reside in a local community and you follow the local team, it’s hard to feel lonely, it’s hard to feel isolated, and it gives you this critical link to others. But the flip side is also that we don’t want to be cookie cutters. We don’t want to be exact with it because if everybody else, we like to stand out in some way, be unique in some way, and sport fandom also provides that.

So it gives us this power to be distinct and unique. It’s funny that when I talk to sports fans—and given what I do, I do that quite frequently—I’ll ask them, so who are your favorite teams? And let’s say I’m talking to somebody who resides near Boston, they’ll say, well, I love the Red Sox and I love the Celtics and I love the Patriots and I love Manchester United. You’re like, wait, what? One of these things is not like the other. And it’s so interesting because that one team allows them to just feel different from everybody else.

So I would say that the most straightforward answer is that people are fans because it helps them meet these basic psychological needs. It’s not the only way that they can meet these needs, but things like belongingness and the need for the distinction and the need for structure and the need for meaning in life, fandom is well suited to help meet those types of needs.

Mills: So what’s the research? How do you study fans and find out technically that they really are benefiting mentally from being fans?

Wann: Yeah, we do it so many ways. Like so many lines of research in psychology over the years, you find laboratory methods and you also find field research. We’ve done it in my research program both ways. We will engage as, they’ve been referred to before, the prey of the social psychology research or your lovely psychology introductory students.

But I also really like going out into the field and going to sporting events and talking to them and surveying them. I have a research team that pretty much every year we’ll pick specific sporting events around the area and we’ll go to, and we always get with these people before the game is because I don’t want to interrupt their entertainment value as well, but we’ll sit down, we’ll pass out questionnaires, talk to them, and I like doing that because it’s in the moment for them. So if they’re at the sporting event, sport is at that point in time to them, and I do think you get some more authentic responses than if they’re sitting in a classroom and stressed out about the test they’re about to take in two hours. So we will use all types of methods. We’ll go to major sporting events, we’ll go to minor sporting events, we’ll go to youth sporting events. Then we’ll also just grab the random psychology student that’s in the classroom.

Mills: And does it matter to one’s health whether you’re a fan of your kid’s little league or a national team?

Wann: Yeah, that’s a great question. And what we find is it really does not. What is critical is the extent to which the person does identify with that team. A term that we will often throw out there in sports psych is team identification, which is simply the extent to which the fan feels some type of psychological connection to the team. How much is the team an extension of the fan? How central is that team and being a fan of that team to their own self or social identity? And what we found is across multiple studies and multiple levels of competition from youth sports, college sports, high school sports, all the way up to major professional sports in the Olympics, is that the more the fan is identified with a local team, the greater that that individual is likely to have a well-rounded sense of psychological health, lower levels of loneliness, lower levels of alienation, a higher sense of self-esteem, less social isolation.

And a critical point is it’s not necessarily the team identification itself that drives this finding. It’s the fact that if you identify with a local team that identification brings with it a group that you can then belong to and by then getting the sense of belonging, you’re then going to get this sense that, well, you know what, I’m not alone in the world and that’s a great thing for our wellbeing. Again, it should go back to Boston. If you’re walking around a Boston mall here in the early spring with a Boston Red Sox cap, people are talking to you, right? You’ve got all of these friends there at the mall, you don’t know where they work, you don’t know what their name is, you don’t know where they live, but they’re saying hi to you. It’d be really hard to feel lonely at that point in time.

The last point that I’ll make is that we know that it’s changing now, this sense of gaining psychological health from fandom, because of the digital age that we’re in. Fifteen years ago, to follow a sport team and feel connected to others, you kind of had to live in that environment. You can watch a sporting event now from anywhere on the planet and plug in online and feel as though you’re actually watching it with others. So we’re being forced to change some of our thinking about how fandom impacts wellbeing because well, being a fan has changed over the last 15 and 20 years because of the social age.

Mills: What if your team is having a bad season? If you’re a really passionate fan, can a loss or a bad season harm your mental health?

Wann: I guess that would depend on how you would define “harm your mental health.” Most certainly, it can make you cranky, upset, aggressive, hostile, violent, in a bad mood, surly. These were things that would be—words that would describe me over the years following both the Cubs and the Kansas City Royals. So I have a lot of expertise with following bad teams. I’ve kind of perfected it. As a matter of fact, the good news—I say the bad news would be that yes, certainly following sports teams because it is central to the identity of how the identified fans, it is going to matter. If you were to take away the emotional response of being a sports fan, you would take away the point of being a sports fan, right? I mean, to be a fan is to be emotional, the elation from the win, the disappointment in the loss, and every potential emotional range in between those two things.

But if a fan feels disappointed at the loss, that’s just the natural reaction. They care about these things, and the problem is they can’t do a whole lot about it, right? They put their heart and soul into following the team and they’re just this idle spectator going, well, I sure hope things go in my direction today. It’s not exactly like I’m the one shooting the free throw, or I’m the one swinging the bat. So they have this sort of sense of helplessness that can intensify the frustration when they lose, but if that occurs, the beauty of it is that nobody I think has perfected coping strategies quite like sports fans have perfected coping strategies. People will often ask me, what’s the craziest thing about sports fans? I really believe that the craziest thing about sports fans is that there actually are sports fans. This has to be the only domain, the only voluntary activity where half the people know, literally, that they’re going to be upset when this thing that they consume voluntarily is over.

They know that there’s at least a 50-50 chance that when they’re done, I’m going to be sad. I’m not going to want to go to work tomorrow on and on and on, and yet they still come back. You would never do that if it was like delivery pizza. If half the time they delivered your pizza late, cold, the wrong pizza, you would not keep going back. Sports fans, we just keep going back and we keep going back because we cope so well, we can look back on the glory years and it makes us feel better about the fact that our team is terrible now, or we can look to the future and see the future as being even more exciting than it is now. I mean, after all, my team is the worst team in the NFL. Hey, that’s good news because that means I have the best pick and the draft upcoming. So we just have this way of convincing ourselves that it’s all going to be okay, it’s not okay now, but it’s going to be okay in the future. And that’s why fans, they just keep coming back. Again, I talk to lots of fans and they so often tell me after losses, I’m never coming back. One hundred percent of them have come back.

Mills: That’s great. What about the impact of betting on sports fans? Those who bet are invested in a different way. What’s going on with them and when they win or lose what’s happening psychologically?

Wann: Yeah, it’s interesting as I look back on the history of sport and then of course the history of fandom that comes with it, it seems like every decade or two there’s a major change in how sport is played out that greatly impacts how fans consume and relate to teams and players in leagues and sports in general. You can think of when night games started, when sport got on TV, then when free agency occurred and all of a sudden my favorite team is somehow now pitching for the rival team that I hate so much. I think that the new thing that we’re looking at now is the fact that what was once an absolute, giant no-no, which is betting on professional sports, is now not just available but embraced by the leagues, who just a few short years ago thought that this was the worst thing that could possibly happen. That if individuals start to bet on sports, it’s going to change how they’re a sports fan. It’s going to change how they follow teams. And then they realize that you know what? Maybe it slightly does change how they follow sport and how they follow teams, but guess what? They do it more often because they have placed a bet, and that’s really good news for the sports leagues. 

It’s kind of surprising that it took the leagues that long to come around to realize that hey, betting fans are, guess what? Betting fans, so they’re going to consume your product. We’ve actually conducted some pretty interesting studies that has looked at how we would expect betting to change fandom. We talked to fans and when they legalize sport wagering, how will it change your perspective as a fan? And the bottom line from that research is it’s really not going to do much to be honest with you.

It’s not going to change a lot of individuals. The people that don’t follow sport that could not care less about sport, they’re not going to suddenly start following sport because you can bet. And the people that live for sport, they’re not going to stop following sport because they can bet—they just might slightly consume some games that they wouldn’t otherwise have watched. It would give them a reason to care about a game that their team is not playing or a rival team is not playing. So what our findings are basically it would slightly increase the interest for some fans, fans that are lower on the scale of interest but still consider themselves a sport fan. These are the ones that say, you know what? It might make me a little nervous or too anxious, so I might not want to do it. The fans are like, I don’t really need a reason to care in a way that’s financially going to damage me, but for your typical, I love my team X fan, it just gives them one more reason to follow.

Mills: What about when fans find out that somebody or even a whole team they revered was cheating, was doing something wrong, was doping like Lance Armstrong for example? What happens to fans then?

Wann: Yeah, it really depends on their level of identification. Again, their level of psychological connection to the team. If they’re low in identification or moderate, so maybe it’s a team that they sort of associate with or maybe they sort of follow their progress over the course of a year, but certainly it would not be something that they would highly self-identify as a fan of that team. For these individuals, they tend to put down the team or the player and it’s going to decrease their likelihood of wanting to be associated with that team. The term that we use in social psychology is cutting off reflected failure. They’ll cut off their association at least psychologically and publicly with that team.

We really, you often hear people say, we’re known by the company we keep. And I always tell my students that that’s not the point. The point isn’t that we’re known by the company we keep. The point is that we know that we are known by the company. We realize that fact and so that knowledge changes our behavior. And nobody wants to be associated with somebody that has done something negative or illegal or that has threatened the quality of this identity. Not nobody actually, because those that are highly identified, you just have to wonder, studying this for 4 decades, what do players and teams have to do to finally convince somebody that they are not worthy of their love? It’s like, I mean, steroids and DUIs and on and on and on, and there’s still fan bases that hold on to those individuals. And once again, they do so because they have perfected coping, they’ve figured out a way to externalize the individual’s transgression. Well, they’re under a lot of pressure, they’re under a lot of stress, or well, everybody does it or they actually weren’t guilty.

There was an Olympian a few years ago, several years ago now that was actually caught doping, performance enhancing drugs. And among huge fans of this sprinter, one of the more common explanations they had was that the rival runners, sprinters, had actually switched out his water bottle and put out a water bottle that had the performance enhancing drugs in it. And they weren’t just making this up, they were literally convinced. So the ability of sports fans to find a way to make it all fit and be okay is what them to continue to support these individuals. Now again, they’re not completely foolish and they understand that when somebody does something they will say they shouldn’t have done that they really shouldn’t have done that was a horrible thing to do. Then they follow that up with, but I’m a forgiving soul, and so it’s all okay with me.

Mills: Why do some people root for underdogs and other people always want to be on the bandwagon with the winning team?

Wann: Yeah, it’s so interesting how when you look at people, they either want to pick the surefire winner or the gross underdog. It’s like they don’t want to pick the team that’s 50-50. And the reason is both of those two, picking the high favorite or the serious underdog, the long shot, both of those two are so psychologically safe. If you pick a team that is slated to be like a 95% likelihood to win, that’s a safe selection. So is picking the team that’s a 5% likelihood to win. Because should that team lose and it looks like they’re going to, you can very easily say, hey, they had no chance.

Now the advantage is if you pick the underdog and they lose, you can say that, right? You can say, well, let’s be honest. They never really had a chance. But if they win, isn’t that victory that much sweeter? Isn’t that victory that much better because it’s unexpected? So I always say that that’s where rooting for the underdog relative to a favorite team, rooting for the underdog, that’s a win-win. If they lose, hey, it’s okay, we’re the lovable losers we’re supposed to. If we win, oh, my gosh, how in the world did we pull that off? One of the best victories ever. It’s amazing how people like safe choices, underdogs are safe choices.

Mills: What about the effect of fans on teams themselves? I mentioned in the intro the home-field advantage. Is it a real thing?

Wann: Absolutely. So there’s a few ways that research over the years, over the decades mostly from social psychology has examined: Do crowds matter, right? I mean certainly they matter to the bottom line in the pocketbooks of the people that own the teams and the leagues, but do they actually matter on the field in terms of performance? And there’s a couple of ways that they do. Certainly social facilitation, the fact that being around others can kind of get people to rise to the occasion or maybe choke under pressure that can have a play in this. But I think that from a sports psych perspective, most individuals do want to talk about and think about is there this home-field advantage?

It is one of the most well replicated and substantiated findings in the realm of sports psychology that home teams, they just do win more. It doesn’t matter the of competition, it doesn’t matter the type of sport. Home teams are going to win more. Typically about 60 to 40 home teams will have an advantage, and they have over the decades put forth several potential explanations for this. One popular one a few decades back was travel and fatigue. Well, traveling several hours by plane is probably going to wear them down. But I mean, have you looked at the planes these people travel on? They’re nicer than my house. I mean, they probably get to the hotel and look around and go, this five-star hotel is a dump compared to the airplane that we were just in.

And so all these other sort of potential explanations, they might matter a little bit, but what research in the last maybe 10 years has found is that what fans are doing is they’re influencing the outcomes of the calls of the officials. That the officials are the ones far more than the players that are being influenced by the fans.

A great example of this, and there’s lots of research, A great example of this is some researchers found that there’s actually a home field advantage in Olympics, really, but they don’t find it for objective sports like the hundred-meter dash. They find it for subjective sports like gymnastics and diving where the judges have such a huge impact on the outcome. That’s where they find the home field advantage, where the officials really do have the biggest say in football games. Some football stadiums will have a track, a running track, like the track meet track around the football stadiums. Others don’t have that. You get a higher home field advantage when that track is not there because the fans are that much closer to the officials and they have that much more of an influence on the officials. So what we know is yes, the home field advantage is alive and well and an honest thing. And it looks like from the current state of the research that the big impact is not on the players themselves as much as it’s on the fans having influence on the decisions that the umpires and the referees are making.

Mills: Are there common traits among certain types of fans? For instance, do some people become fans because they have low self-esteem and they need some external validation? Or do people with say, violent tendencies, revere boxing and mixed martial arts?

Wann: We’ve been looking for the recipe for a sports fan for a long time in sports psychology, and I’m sad to say we have not yet found it. Every time we think we might have found one, somebody else comes along as a sports fan and they’re completely different. If you go to a stadium that has as few as 150, 200 people in that stadium watching a game, you’re going to find every single different personality trait possible among those 150 and 200 people. Now, does that mean that we haven’t found certain characteristics of sports fans in research? I mean, we have. So for example, sports fans tend to slide slightly towards an extroverted crowd. That makes sense because most sports fans, they will consume in a public scenario. But when you look at how much variance is accounted for, how powerful these effects are, it’s just minuscule.

And so what we really say now is that sure, maybe individuals who tend towards a preference for stylistic things in life would lean towards, I don’t know, diving, gymnastics, figure skating that maybe that’s there, but it’s such a small effect that you’re way better off saying every kind of person seems to every kind of sport out there. We did some research a few years ago where we thought, you know what? I bet there should be a scenario where fans that are, they’re really into it because of the family nature of sport that they see sport as an opportunity to spend time with their kids and their spouses. We thought those people, they really shouldn’t like violent sports. That doesn’t seem like it should fit.

Nope, not at all. We absolutely found it that they don’t care at all that they’re going to take their kids to the track meet and they’re going to take their kids to the bowling alley and they’re going to take them to the professional wrestling match. It literally did not matter to these people. We also thought that, well, maybe instead they would like stylistic sports and nope, didn’t matter. Every kind of person that you can imagine seems like every different kind of sport that is out there. And when you factor in how many millions and millions and millions of fans there are in the world, that kind of starts to make some sense. Yeah.

Mills: When does fandom cross the line into something unhealthy? I’m assuming that it sometimes does.

Wann: Anytime you have individuals that can get as wrapped up into something as some fans can get into sport, you’re going to have individuals who cross the line. I always refer to this as the darker side of sport fandom. I think that it’s critical that we talk about this. I think that it’s critical that we don’t only talk about this. I think that that was one of the, I mean, it was a criticism of psychology for so long. We just didn’t want to really talk about the good sides of humanity. Positive psychology comes along 3, 4 decades ago and lets us know, hey, it’s okay to talk about high self-esteem as well as low self-esteem. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing to talk about what sport fandom does positively. But we also have to be honest and admit that there are times when sports fans do things that cross the line.

I think certainly sport fan aggression is the obvious thing at the top of this list, that there are that, I mean, they do things that they should not do. I mean, they hurl things at players. They say things at players and they get in fights with fans, and it is not a pretty sight when it occurs. It is rare. So one of the things, in addition to the fact that sports fandom can have this facilitating effect for some individuals on aggression where they get too wrapped up in the moment at the sporting event, we can also see some of the darker side in terms of their interpersonal relationships and their lack of care about their job, that we actually have individuals out there that they’ll admit that they will consume sport over 100 hours a week. And if you consume something 100 hours a week, that doesn’t give a whole lot of time for, I mean, a loved one, your kids, a job, sleep, food. It doesn’t give a whole lot of time for anything.

And so I think that again, we have to admit that these things are there. Very small percentage. Most individuals, they will say that sport fandom is a positive influence on their relationship. About 2 or 3% will say it probably has some type of detrimental effect. But again, if you’re going to say that one fight in a crowd is too many, I’m going to say that 2% of individuals having their lives negatively impacted by fandom is 2% too many. It shouldn’t have that negative effect. And so we need to talk about the darker side as well. We need to be honest with ourselves and say, okay, can we do things that lower these numbers that move the needle?

Because if 2% have a negative impact for fandom on their interpersonal relationships, that means there’s 2% of relationship partners, right? Two percent of families. If you have one fight in the stands, okay, fine, that’s two people, maybe three people, four people. But that’s dozens of people around that individual who had their positive experience seriously interrupted, and they can feel threatened by this. And we know that one incidence like this is enough to make some individuals shy away from coming back. It puts a bad taste in their mouth. And so just because it’s vastly in the minority, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of our attention and isn’t potentially impacting more people in total than you might think.

Mills: Is this kind of aggression among fans on the increase?

Wann: Boy, wouldn’t we love to know that? So I’ve been giving these interviews for the better part of 3 and a half decades. That is for certain the most common question that I get. And it is awful to answer the most common question that you get for one third of a century by saying, we don’t know. I wish I had an answer, but I just do not want to lie and not reflect the research. And in this case, what research, how would we know? So when we define aggression among fans, it counts if you’re yelling obscenities, as it should, it counts if you’re yelling obscenities, there’s nobody in the stands with a clicker counting obscenities. Probably there should be. Maybe we don’t want to know those numbers.

But I can say this, there are certainly a lot of theoretical perspectives out there that would suggest that yes, aggression is on the rise. We might not have absolute concrete numbers, but we know things that would suggest that it should be. For example, we know that team identification can play a role in aggression, and we know that people are now more likely to identify with sports teams than there were maybe 20, 40, 60 years ago. Because other social institutions with which they used to identify work, extended family, living close to home, attending religious institutions, these things can be on the decline. Something has to take the place of that, right? We’re not going to stop being social creatures. If fandom is chosen as the option to take the place of that, all of a sudden you care more about fandom, all of a sudden you’re more likely to get upset if they lose.

Society, we’re not as nice as we used to be. Empathy levels going down, civility levels going down. People have traced this for many decades. If society has less civility, why would we expect there to be anything different among the fans in stadiums? Right? So I can’t say yes, in 2019 the number was this, and in 2014 it was this. But I can tell you theories matter, and we know that there are several theories that would suggest that yeah, it’s on the rise. And then you can also just say, go to a sporting event, trying to remember what it was like 25, 45, 55 years ago. It doesn’t feel the same, right? Fifty-five years ago, they didn’t have family sections. They have to have family sections now because they have to quarantine the people that don’t want to be exposed to all the rowdy and dysfunctional fans. That should tell you that, yeah, maybe something not so pleasant’s going on.

Mills: Sure, sure. And the men were wearing suits and the women were wearing dresses.

Wann: Exactly. Different world.

Mills: Yeah. Now, speaking of age, I’ve read some reporting that younger people are less likely to be sports fans now than older generations. There was a recent article in USA Today that was called “Gen Z doesn’t care about sports.” Does that track with your experience and research? And if it does, what do you think is causing this?

Wann: There’s no doubt that that’s true. As a matter of fact, one of the recent conversations I had with some of the administration in our university’s athletic department was that we draw pretty well for our men’s basketball team. Murray State historically has had a pretty good men’s basketball team, and we will get 5-, 6-, 7,000 fans for a typical game, not bad for a mid-major university. And I told our athletic director, I said, if I were you, I’d be nervous because when you look around, they’re all in their 40s and 50s and 60s. You don’t see—very, very, very few are in their 20s at these sporting events, and certainly not in their teens. There are so many things that individuals that are 15, 20, 25 that they had an opportunity to do and get exposed to when they were growing up that older generations did not. Right? There are just more entertainment options that are out there.

When I grew up, you had ABC, CBS, NBC, and pretty much that was it. On a good day, maybe PBS would come in, but that was about it. And so now how many different options just on TV and streaming and on and on, there’s such a competition for the entertainment time for the younger generations that we didn’t have. So less likely to be socialized into sport fandom because they’re more likely to be doing other things, right? There’s no doubt that this is true.

Sport fandom is going to be very interesting in about 30 years when the people that buy tickets are no longer around to buy the tickets. I doubt I’ll be here to see that. If I am I’m really curious to see how that plays out because it’s just—fandom is aging out, fandom is aging out. And I’m not saying that there aren’t young individuals who are fans. There are, but just look at a stadium. I mean, it’s an older crowd relative to what it used to be. And younger individuals, they have more opportunities, they have more things to do, and so they’re less likely to care about any one thing.

Mills: So is this trend having an impact on your course enrollment?

Wann: It does not, thankfully, because there’s always enough fans that are out there. Interestingly enough, I have about 20% of my sport fan psychology class that are absolutely not sports fans, that they detest sport, they’ve never followed it, and they don’t understand it. And so they take the class to try and figure out what in the world is going on with all these people that are putting all of this time and money into these activities. And it, it’s funny because they’ll be apologetic about taking the class, and I tell them, no, I can’t have enough of you people in this class because you give the counterbalance to class discussions. If it’s just all a bunch of sports fans, the class discussion becomes preaching to the choir. The fact that I have three or four or five non-fans in there, it serves as a check and a balance to the other individuals, and it really makes them do some type of self-awareness test of, yeah, why do I do so much of this? Apparently not everybody does, and it gets for much better conversations.

Mills: So in the past few years, a lot of athletes have become more open about their mental health struggles. Do you think that this trend is changing the way that fans relate to athletes in the way that they think about sports in general?

Wann: As a social scientist I certainly hope so. I think that sports fans, they’re certainly slow to come around. I mean, let’s just be honest. I mean, you change a team’s logo, just the logo, and for 20 years, they can’t get over what a distrustful and awful scenario that was. That’s just a picture of some creature. And for years, we know that athletes were taught to suck it up, don’t cry this and that. I hope that athletes by coming out are changing how fans view athletes and that they’re not animals, that they’re not robots, that they’re actually humans, that they have feelings, that they are fallible and that what they’re doing, their performance is in the public eye. Everybody gets to see when they have a bad day. And I think that a lot of fans would be really upset if everybody, and by everybody, I mean literally millions of people get to see when you messed up at work. I think that that might change their perspective. My hope is that individuals see the humanity in athletics and that we start to give these people a little bit of slack that you know what? It’s okay for them to be human too. I mean, it should be, they are human.

Mills: Yeah. Like Simone Biles getting the twisties.

Wann: Exactly. Exactly. And you know what? As it comes out more, and fans get more used to it, more athletes will then feel empowered to come out and it will seem less abnormal. And then that’s that snowball that you hope you see over the next 8, 10, 12 years.

Mills: So what’s next for you? What else are you looking at? What are the big questions?

Wann: So what we’ve been looking at now actually is fans’ beliefs about how they think they can influence the outcomes of sporting events. We know that they sort of can by maybe potentially have an impact on the players, but definitely having an impact on officials. Well, we’ve been asking them, what do you do to try and influence the outcome? So to what extent do you have superstitions, prayer, yell encouragement, yell derogatory comments towards the officials and the other team? And what we found was so interesting in the first study that’s under review at a journal now is that all of the different methods that they use are positively correlated. So the more they use one method, the more they use another. That to me is absolutely hysterical because it means that the more someone is likely to cuss out an official to help the team win is also more likely to pray to help the team win.

And somewhere that to me is just so wonderfully funny. I can’t get past it. The study that we’re starting now that will begin this fall is now that we know that fans engage in these acts to try and influence, we’re now asking them, which ones do you think work best? We know what they do now we’d like to know. Okay, so pitchers have their go-to pitch, point guards have their go-to move. We want to know what the fans’ go-to active influence is when it’s really close. Right? When it’s really close, do you cuss or do you pray or do you rub your lucky rabbit’s foot? That’s what we’re after.

Mills: Now that’s a great question. Well, Dr. Wann, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.

Wann: Absolutely been my pleasure.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org . Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman, or sound editor is Chris Condayan.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.