Nadav Goldschmied

The Advantage of Disadvantage: Underdogs in the Political Arena

Political candidates are often labeled as underdogs, either by the press or themselves. This paper explores connotations associated with the underdog label in the political arena. We argue that being labeled an underdog has a strategic advantage because it is associated with positive qualities, particularly likeability. The current studies demonstrate that partisan supporters prefer to see their favored candidate as an underdog compared to people not aligned with the candidate, and underdog-labeled entities are perceived to be warmer, and no less competent, than frontrunners. Discussion focuses on the advantages and risks of carrying the underdog label in the political arena.

The Future is Bright: The Underdog Label, Availability, and Optimism

Research suggests that people support underdogs. Three studies examined how laypeople conceptualize the underdog label. Study 1 used a free association method to create a semantic network map of the underdog construct. In Study 2, participants provided their own definitions and selected the entity that best exemplified an underdog. In the two studies, the underdog term was linked to both disadvantage and successful qualities. In Study 3, participants read fictional stories about competing entities unlikely to succeed. When targets were labeled as underdogs, participants predicted that they would perform significantly better than expectations. We suggest that, although dictionaries define underdogs as unlikely to prevail, a laypersons conceptions, shaped by inspirational archetypal stories of odds overcome, are more optimistic.

Drive Theory and Home Run Milestones in Baseball: An Historical Analysis:

The purpose of this investigation was to test whether the performance of the home run hitters in Major League Baseball adhered to predictions of Drive Theory. 24 baseball players who have hit at least 505 home runs were included in the sample. Their performance was assessed around the time in which they reached a significant home run career milestone, operationalized as either 500 or 600 home runs, or surpassing the leagues home run record. As predicted, the players were found to require significantly more at-bats to complete the 5 home runs before the milestone, when stress was assumed to be mounting, than the 5 home runs after the milestone. In contrast, those players who reached the personal landmark from 1988 (the suspected commencement of the so-called “Steroid Era”) onwards required the same number of at-bats before and after the milestone.

“I Went to a Fight the Other Night and a Hockey Game Broke Out”: Is Professional Hockey Fighting Calculated or Impulsive?

Background: The current study explored the relationship between fighting behavior and passage of time, across games and seasons, in an attempt to assess if violent behavior in hockey is impulsive or intentional. Hypothesis: Before engaging in fighting behavior, players assess the utility of their actions and thus will fight less when the game is on the line (third period) and when champions are crowned (postseason). Methods: An archival exploration utilizing open access databases from multiple Internet sources. Results: During the 2010-2011 National Hockey League (NHL) season, players were significantly less likely to be involved in a fight as the game was coming to a close than in its early stages. In addition, data from the past 10 NHL seasons showed that players were significantly more violent in preseason games than during the regular season. They were also least likely to be involved in a fight during the postseason. Conclusion: The converging evidence suggests that players take into account the penalties associated with fighting and are less likely to engage in violence when the stakes are high, such as at the end of a game or a season. This implies, in turn, that major acts of aggression in the league are more likely to be calculated rather than impulsive. The findings suggest that a more punitive system should diminish fighting behavior markedly.

“Air ball, air ball!”: A study of collective crowd chanting in collegiate basketball.

We explored crowd behavior in the context of sports by studying 139 men’s National Collegiate Athletic Association televised basketball games, focusing on attempts at shot that completely missed the basket and are thus known colloquially as “airball shots” (ABSs). Through repeated observations, 354 instances were identified in 124 of these games. When an away player launches an ABS, the home crowd is likely to recite in unison an “Air ball, air ball” chant (ABC) to single the shooter out to supposedly generate an ego threat and to impede his future performance. We studied multiple player factors such as status (i.e., being a game starter or not), success on the previous shooting attempt, ABS distance, and ABS outcome, as well as crowd density, and found that home crowds were more likely to initially chant when the shot was made from a distance and when it resulted in a lost possession. Home crowds were also more persistent in their ABC when the shot was made farther from the basket. The findings are discussed in the context of early and current crowd behavior theories.

Appraising Loftus and Palmer (1974) Post-Event Information versus Concurrent Commentary in the Context of Sport:

Two experiments were conducted to examine framing effects in sport. In Experiment 1, a conceptual replication [Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585–589], participants watched a hockey collision, with the hit described later in a written format as a “contact”, “bump”, or “smash”. This manipulation resulted in no differences in participants’ report of how fast the players were skating, their intentions, and the outcome of the hit. In Experiment 2, participants watched the same video clip with ongoing commentary. Those who heard the announcer describing the event as “contact” estimated a higher skating speed than participants who were exposed to the “smash” commentary. Participants who were exposed to the “bump” commentary rated the repercussions of the collision as less severe than did those exposed to the other commentaries. These findings show that the perception of magnitude hierarchy may be domain specific and suggest future avenues for exploring framing effects when one is exposed to visual stimuli.

Do Fans and Officials Think Alike When Assessing the Home-Field Advantage? Support for Actor–Observer Asymmetry in the National Football League

Missing from the research on the home-field advantage (HFA) phenomenon in sports are the opinions of expert referees. Utilizing the actor–observer asymmetry (Jones & Nisbett, 1971) perspective, we surveyed elite NFL officials and fans in exploring the importance they attributed to factors associated with the HFA in American football. Results revealed that fans perceived themselves as more influential in biasing the officials to favor the home team, while officials perceived this influence as negligible Both fans and officials agreed that fans strongly influenced players’ performance. Also, fans thought that more games were decided by referees in error across different sports.