The Science of Hate in College FootballThe Wall Street Journal
By Ben Cohen Nov. 27, 2014 7:47 p.m. ET
In college football, where fans of opposing teams can’t agree on much of anything, they do share one opinion: There is no such thing as a boring rivalry.
Rivalry games make or break seasons even when the matchups appear lopsided. This season’s rivalry weekend, for instance, has a number of them: Florida State, Ohio State and Oregon are all in the College Football Playoff race, while rivals Florida, Michigan and Oregon State are all having excruciating seasons. But if any of them pull off an upset Saturday, it would make their year—and ruin their rival’s.
The feelings of rivalry are incredibly powerful. They’re also simple enough for everyone to understand—or at least think they do.
As it turns out, the concept of rivalries is increasingly the topic of psychological research, which often proves conventional wisdom to be quite wrong. Until now, despite everything we already believed, it remained a mystery if and how the emotions of rivalries changed human behavior. No one had any idea whether the Iron Bowl between Auburn and Alabama was truly different from any other game.
But here’s the thing about the emerging science: It is becoming clear that rivalries really are extraordinary. And they may be easiest to comprehend through the window of this weekend’s football games.
“College sports,” said New York University management professor Gavin Kilduff, one of the field’s leading researchers, “are a fantastic context for studying rivalry.”
First, though, the scholars must answer a question that football fans find elementary: What is a rivalry?
It isn’t the same as ordinary competition. The idea that people act differently in competitive settings dates to a breakthrough study in 1898 by Norman Triplett, a godfather of social psychology, who found that cyclists raced faster when other cyclists were present. But only in the last decade have academics pinpointed what, exactly, makes rivalries worthy of their own study: the extra psychological stakes.
“Rivalry is fundamentally related to competition, but it’s competition over time,” said Harvard psychologist Mina Cikara. That, she said, provides an “opportunity for attitudes and emotions to become more polarized and entrenched.”
The oomph in every rivalry, Kilduff said, comes from similarity, proximity and history. Auburn versus Alabama—an intrastate matchup of public universities that dates to 1893—could be a case study. His research also shows that sports rivalries are stronger when their historical records against each other are closer. As it happens, heading into Saturday’s games, Auburn-Alabama and Ole Miss-Mississippi State both are 18-16 since 1980 in favor of the former, while Ohio State leads Michigan, 17-16, with one tie (in all games played).
These factors weigh rivalry games with additional importance. In the Mississippi State locker room, for instance, there is a clock with one function: counting down to the annual Egg Bowl against Ole Miss. “Our players see it every day,” Bulldogs coach Dan Mullen said. “And it resets right after the game.”
Kilduff’s most fascinating finding is that rivalries increase motivation—and improve performance. In one study, published in July in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, he looked at race results from members of a running club, examining what happened when rival runners raced against each other. He learned that the runners were faster—by about 25 seconds in 5-kilometer races—when competing against their rivals.
Athletes feel the physiological effects of rivalry, too. For a 2003 study, English soccer players were asked to offer salivary samples before and after practices and games against different opponents. The study showed that their testosterone spiked for the rivalry games.
The added effort may explain why rivalries seem to produce so many unexpected, unforgettable moments. In the last 25 years, double-digit underdogs have stayed within single digits of their rivals in 48% of their games, compared with 39% of all other games, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis for 15 top betting lines. The underdogs pulled off upsets at a higher rate, too.
But the emotional swings of rivalries aren’t always a formula for success. There is enough scholarly literature about choking under pressure to fill Michigan Stadium, while academics caution that they are just beginning to learn how rivalries shape our lives. Researchers are currently studying whether rivalries across all industries lead to overconfidence, riskier strategies or unethical actions, among other behavioral shifts.
The science is more advanced, however, when it comes to fans.
The most intriguing study so far is an experiment that turned up neural proof of rivalry-related schadenfreude. The subjects in this paper, published in 2011 in the journal Psychological Science, were avid New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox fans who were asked to monitor baseball plays. They couldn’t lie about their feelings, though: Their brains were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines.
As expected, the die-hards were giddy when their teams made positive plays, which the researchers confirmed with activity in the ventral striatum, a part of the brain that correlates with pleasure. But the study was more revealing in people who felt greater aggression toward their rivals. The ventral striatum was engaged not only when their teams succeeded but also when their rivals failed—even against other teams. Cody Havard, a sports commerce professor at Memphis, calls this phenomenon “GORFing,” short for “glory out of reflected failure.”
Rivalries also bring out emotions that fans would rather suppress. One group of Kentucky psychologists studied schadenfreude (pleasure from others’ misfortune) and gluckschmerz (displeasure from others’ good fortune) by having the region’s rabid basketball fans read articles about injured Duke players. In this study, the most obsessed Kentucky fans felt schadenfreude when Duke’s players were severely hurt and gluckschmerz when they recovered or the injuries were actually mild, according to a paper published in the journal Motivation and Emotion this month.
“This is what is so fascinating about groups and sports fans in particular,” said Cikara, who led the study of baseball fans. “People get invested and worked up about events and games over which they have no control.”
In a sport as tribal as college football, though, fans play an outsize role in rivalries. The players in this weekend’s games were recently fans themselves. More than half of the rosters in this year’s Egg Bowl come from the state of Mississippi. Many of them grew up rooting for—or against—the schools they attend. Only some will have bulletproof bragging rights after Saturday.
Only the winner of this game can say, “ ‘We won the Egg Bowl,’ ” Mississippi State’s Mullen said. “There’s no response to that.”
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