Paradoxical effects of supportive audiences on performance under pressure: The home field disadvantage in sports championships.

Abstract

On the basis of recent research on self-presentation and self-attention, we predicted that the presence of supportive audiences might be detrimental to performance in some circumstances. Specifically, the imminent opportunity to claim a desired identity in front of a supportive audience might engender a state of self-attentio n that could interfere with the execution of skillful responses. Archival data from championship series in two major league sports supported this reasoning. In baseball's World Series, home teams tend to win early games but lose decisive (final) games. Supplementary analyses suggested that the pattern occurs when the home team has the opportunity to win the championship and that it does involve performance decrements by the home team. Similar patterns were found in semifinal and championship series in professional basketball. The present study concerns whether the presence of supportive versus unsympathetic audiences could interact with opportunities for claiming desired identities to cause paradoxical decrements in the quality of performance. Researchers of self-presentation have used terms such as audience and performance to describe self-presentation ever since Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical analysis of behavior. Our study seeks to test self-presentational hypotheses in the context of actual professional performers and their audiences. We chose professional athletic contests because they provide circumscribed, quantifiable performances and because careful records are generally kept. Our hypotheses were derived by the three steps that follow.