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Basketball and Behavior: Could Obama Have Helped Murray State Beat Vanderbilt?
Posted on 03/25/2010 @ 06:14 PM
Mindy Hernandez, Founder, One Decision
I’m not a sports fan (at all) but I have a strange fascination with the NCAA college championships. Each year around March, I turn into a person I barely recognize as I search out sports blogs and says things like, “that was a beautiful crosscourt pass!” with total sincerity.
But you don’t have to love college basketball to appreciate the beauty of huge upsets- watching the joy of underdogs becoming champions. From a behavioral perspective, it’s fascinating to watch people who knew they were being perceived as “losers” turn into “winners” in just a few hours- or, in the case of Murray State, within a few seconds. (You can actually hear the announcer say: “heroes are born in March!”). This is what happened Thursday night when 13th seeded Murray State defeated 4th seated Vanderbilt with seconds left in the game. Of course, the corollary is that you see the faces of those whose identity was clearly of a “winner" (Vanderbilt) become stunned and sometimes just crumble when that their perceived identity changes suddenly.
Every year there are a few upsets and a few- though not many- people had picked Murray State to beat Vanderbilt. Now, President Obama is getting a lot of attention for getting the health care bill passed. But he deserves our attention and applause for a different, less celebrated achievement: Obama was one of the few who made the unlikely prediction that Murray State would win this game. And he did this in a very public way on ESPN. You can see it in the first few seconds of the first video above.
His predictions were widely publicized and it’s reasonable to assume that many Murray State players knew the President viewed them as “winners”. There is a fair amount of compelling research on the impact of stereotypes and identity on cognitive and academic performance. When we relate to an identity associated with success on a certain task, we are likely to perform better on that task. Of course, this works in both directions. A lovely example comes from a 1999 study by Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady. When Asian women were implicitly reminded (or primed to think about) their identity as women they scored lower on a math test than when they were reminded of their identity as Asian.
President Obama has been linked with this effect in the past. A 2009 Vanderbilt study found what the authors called an “Obama Effect” showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.
Much less is known about stereotype threat and athletic performance. So the open question is, can “winner” be a salient identity that can be primed and impact athletic performance? Specifically, if Murray State knew Obama had associated them as “winners” could this have primed their identity as winners and impacted their performance? What additional impact might it have had to have an African-American President make a prediction about a largely African-American starting team?
If you'd like to read more about psychology and the NCAA tournament, check out this interesting article on how unconscious bias is unfairly impacting the seeding of NCAA teams.
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