Oct 22 2009
The Animal Nature of Serious Fans
In the mammal kingdom, when one individual battles another and wins, its testosterone level rises. For the loser there is a drop. This phenomenon has been found to hold true for human athletes: While the winner in a competition — a game — undergoes a upward spike in testosterone, the loser’s level heads in the other direction.
Interestingly, the affect holds true for friends and fans as well. In team sports, fans of the winning team experience a surge in their testosterone levels. (Does this explain why it is the fans of the winning team, after a huge victory, that sometimes go an a destructive rampage, why they get all aped-up?)
Recent research has discovered this parallel phenomenon: Presidential election outcome changed voters’ testosterone. Specifically,
Young men who voted for Republican John McCain or Libertarian candidate Robert Barr in the 2008 presidential election suffered an immediate drop in testosterone when the election results were announced, according to a study by researchers at Duke University and the University of Michigan.
(For a liberal like me, both of George Bush’s presidential victories were a kick in the balls.)
What about women? Does the finding hold for them? Good question.
The findings mirror what other studies have found in men who participate directly in an interpersonal contest — the winner gets a boost of testosterone, while the loser’s testosterone drops. Testosterone is a steroid hormone manufactured by the testes that is linked to aggression, risk-taking and responses to threats. Women have it too but in much lesser amounts and originating from different sources (their ovaries and adrenal glands), which makes them less likely to experience rapid testosterone changes following victory or defeat.
Is that one of the reasons why women can be more “level-headed”? Is that why men get such a charge over sports, sometimes behaving like power-drunk apes? You never see women take their shirts off at sub-freezing football games to expose torsos painted in team colors. (Maybe there are other factors involved with that one.)
This phenomenon of vicariously felt victory and defeat all about, what is it all about? To me, it is yet more evidence that we are a hyper-social species that takes social alliances very seriously. If we didn’t feel what our allies felt, how unified with them could we really be? Without being unified in perception and feeling, how unified can we be in behavior?
Of course, our primate psychology, having evolved over millions of years, may be a poor fit for the modern world. While it is unlikely that the outcome of a Super Bowl would ever spark World War Three, ancient allegiances (and only slightly more ridiculous) to ethnic and religious “teams” just might.
[...] with the athletes who did. Their alliance to the team is part of our innate desire to belong and to empathize with allies. The fans of winning teams feel sexier after a victory, even though they probably just drank 5 [...]
[...] with the athletes who did. Their alliance to the team is part of our innate desire to belong and to empathize with allies. The fans of winning teams feel sexier after a victory, even though they probably just drank 5 [...]