Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Then one day, a radio in his ward happened to be tuned to a soccer match between his hometown team and a traditional rival. When at a crucial point of play the referee called a foul against a player from the man's home team, the mute veteran jumped from his chair, glared at the radio, and spoke his first words in more than three decades: 'You dumb ass!' he cried. 'Are you trying to give them the match?' With that, he returned to his chair and to a silence he never again violated.

There are two important lessons to be derived from this true story. The first concerns the sheer power of the phenomenon. The veteran's desire to have his hometown team succeed was so strong that it alone produced a deviation from his solidly entrenched way of life. Similar effects of sports events on the long-standing habits of fans are far from unique to the back wards of veterans' hospitals. During the 1980 Winter Olympics, after the U.S. hockey team had upset the vastly favored Soviet team, the teetotaling father of the American goaltender, Jim Craig, was offered a flask. 'I've never had a drink in my life,' he reported later, 'but someone behind me handed me cognac. I drank it. Yes, I did.' Nor was such unusual behavior unique to parents of the players. Fans outside the hockey arena were described in news accounts as delirious: 'They hugged, sang, and turned somersaults in the snow.' Even those fans not present at Lake Placid exulted in the victory and displayed their pride with bizarre behavior. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a swim meet had to be halted when, after the hockey score was announced, the competitors and audience alike chanted 'U.S.A.! U.S.A.!' until they were hoarse. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a quiet supermarket erupted at the news into a riot of flying toilet tissue and paper towel streamers. The customers were joined in their spree—and soon led—by the market employees and manager.

Without question, the force is deep and sweeping. But if we return to the account of the silent veteran, we can see that something else is revealed about the nature of the union of sports and sports fan, something crucial to its basic character: It is a personal thing. Whatever fragment of an identity that ravaged, mute man still possessed was engaged by soccer play. No matter how weakened his ego may have become after thirty years of wordless stagnation in a hospital ward, it was involved in the outcome of the match. Why? Because he, personally, would be diminished by a hometown defeat. How? Through the principle of association. The mere connection of birthplace hooked him, wrapped him, tied him to the approaching triumph or failure. As distinguished author Isaac Asimov put it in describing our reactions to the contests we view, 'All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality... and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person.Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.'

When viewed in this light, the passion of the sports fan begins to make sense. The game is no light diversion to be enjoyed for its inherent form and artistry. The self is at stake. That is why hometown crowds are so adoring and, more tellingly, so grateful toward those regularly responsible for home-team victories. That is also why the same crowds are often ferocious in their treatment of players, coaches, and officials implicated in athletic failures.

Fans' intolerance of defeat can shorten the careers of even successful players and coaches. Take the case of Frank Layden, who abruptly quit as coach of the NBA's Utah Jazz while the team was leading the league's Midwest Division. Layden's relative success, warm humor, and widely known charitable activities in the Salt Lake City area were not enough to shield him from the ire of some Jazz supporters after team losses. Citing a brace of incidents with abusive fans, including one in which people waited around for an hour to curse at him following a defeat, Layden explained his decision: 'Sometimes in the NBA, you feel like a dog. I've had people spit on me. I had a guy come up to me and say, 'I'm a lawyer. Hit me, hit me, so I can sue you.' I think America takes all sports too seriously.'

So we want our affiliated sports teams to win to prove our own superiority. But to whom are we trying to prove it? Ourselves, certainly; but to everyone else, too. According to the association principle, if we can surround ourselves with success that we are connected with in even a superficial way (for example, place of residence), our public prestige will rise.

Are sports fans right to think that without ever throwing a block, catching a ball, scoring a goal, or perhaps even attending a game, they will receive some of the glory from a hometown championship? I believe so. The evidence is in their favor. Recall that Persia's messengers did not have to cause the news, my weatherman did not have to cause the weather, and Pavlov's bell did not have to cause the food for powerful effects to occur. The association was enough.

It is for this reason that, were the University of Southern California to win the Rose Bowl, we could expect people with a Southern Cal connection to try to increase the visibility of that connection in any of a variety of ways. In one experiment showing how wearing apparel can serve to proclaim such an association, researchers counted the number of school sweatshirts worn on Monday mornings by students on the campuses of seven prominent football universities: Arizona State, Louisiana State, Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State, Pittsburgh, and Southern California. The results showed that many more home-school shirts were worn if the football team had won its game on the prior Saturday. What's more, the larger the margin of victory, the more such shirts appeared. It wasn't a close, hard-fought game that caused the students to dress themselves, literally, in success; instead, it was a clear, crushing conquest smacking of indisputable superiority.

This tendency to try to bask in reflected glory by publicly trumpeting our connections to successful others has its mirror image in our attempt to avoid being darkened by the shadow of others' defeat. In an amazing display during the luckless 1980 season, season-ticket-holding fans of the New Orleans Saints football team began to appear at the stadium wearing paper bags to conceal their faces. As their team suffered loss after loss, more and more fans donned the bags until TV cameras were regularly able to record the extraordinary image of gathered masses of people shrouded in brown paper with nothing to identify them but the tips of their noses. I find it instructive that during a late-season contest, when it was clear that the Saints were at last going to win one, the fans discarded their bags and went public once more.

All this tells me that we purposefully manipulate the visibility of our connections with winners and losers in order to make ourselves look good to anyone who could view these connections. By showcasing the positive associations and burying the negative ones, we are trying to get observers to think more highly of us and to like us more. There are many ways we go about this, but one of the simplest and most pervasive is in the pronouns we use. Have you noticed, for example, how often after a home-team victory fans crowd into the range of a TV camera, thrust their index fingers high, and shout, 'We're number one! We're number one!' Note that the call is not 'They're number one' or even 'Our team is number one.' The pronoun is 'we,' designed to imply the closest possible identity with the team.

Note also that nothing similar occurs in the case of failure. No television viewer will ever hear the chant, 'We're in last place! We're in last place!' Home-team defeats are the times for distancing oneself. Here 'we' is not nearly as preferred as the insulating pronoun 'they.' To prove the point, I once did a small experiment in which students at Arizona State University were phoned and asked to describe the outcome of a football game their school team had played a few weeks earlier. Some of the students were asked the outcome of a certain game their team had lost; the other students were asked the outcome of a different game—one their team had won. My fellow researcher, Avril Thorne, and I simply listened to what was said and recorded the percentage of students who used the word 'we' in their descriptions. When the results were tabulated, it was obvious that the students had tried to connect themselves to success by using the pronoun 'we' to describe their school-team victory—'We beat Houston, seventeen to fourteen,' or 'We won.' In the case of the lost game, however, 'we' was rarely used. Instead, the students used terms designed to keep themselves separate from their vanquished team—'They lost to Missouri, thirty to twenty,' or 'I don't know the score, but Arizona State got beat.' Perhaps the twin desires to connect ourselves to winners and to distance ourselves from losers were combined consummately in the remarks of one particular student. After dryly recounting the score of the home-team defeat—'Arizona State lost it, thirty to twenty'—he blurted in anguish, 'They threw away our chance for a national championship!'²

If it is true that, to make ourselves look good, we try to bask in the reflected glory of the successes we are even remotely associated with, a provocative implication emerges: We will be most likely to use this approach when we feel that we don't look so good. When-ever our public image is damaged, we will experience an increased desire to restore that image by trumpeting our ties to successful others. At the same time, we will most scrupulously avoid publicizing our ties to failing others. Support for these ideas comes from the telephone study of Arizona State University students. Before being asked about the home-team victory or loss, they were given a test of their general knowledge. The test was rigged so that some of the students would fail badly while the others would do quite