The science of why fans on each sideline really do see different games, and why that makes it easier to stay quiet.
“Come on, ref! That was clearly a foul!” Or later in the game: “There’s no WAY that was offside!”
We’ve all heard parents yelling from the sidelines. Maybe we’ve even been one of them.
It’s great that our club has asked us all to take part in The Sidelines Project, as a way to think more carefully about how we carry ourselves at games. It will really help you and your player enjoy the game more. But here I want to offer something extra to think about while you sit there keeping your thoughts to yourself.
I’m a linguist who studies the relationship between language and thought, so I’ve become interested not only in how we sound on the sidelines, but in something deeper happening in how we see. Two weeks ago, as our 2009s got ready to play a tournament final (they won, yay), I watched a few minutes of the consolation game. I had no stake in it, and the calls looked reasonable to me. A couple of fouls on each side, a few advantage calls, a few rough plays that looked like they were all ball. The referees seemed to be doing solid work.
But parents on both sides were getting outraged, and along predictable lines. They were upset when calls went against their team, or when they thought a foul against their team went uncalled. I never once saw anyone upset that a call went their way.
That seems obvious, but what’s actually going on?
There’s a lot of research in cognitive psychology on this. It goes by a few names: partisan perception, in-group bias, hostile attribution bias, naïve realism, self-serving bias and motivated reasoning are all part of the same family. The research goes back a long way. In a now-famous 1954 paper, researchers showed Princeton and Dartmouth students a film of a rough football game between their schools. Princeton students mostly noticed Dartmouth’s fouls, and Dartmouth students mostly saw Princeton’s. It wasn’t close: Princeton students saw nearly twice as many fouls by Dartmouth as by Princeton, while Dartmouth students saw the two teams committing about the same number.
The paper was called “They Saw a Game,” and the title was ironic. The authors argued this wasn’t just bias or selective memory. It was a kind of group thinking that shaped what people saw in the first place. They weren’t just disagreeing about what they saw. In a real sense, they were watching different games.
Keep that in mind on the sidelines. Yes, as The Sidelines Project says, your player will enjoy the game more and play better if you keep your voice down and your thoughts to yourself. But it’s also worth knowing, as you bite your lip, that your brain may be skewing what you see in completely predictable ways.
Knowing that has helped me not only stay quiet, but feel better while I do.
Let the referee, who doesn’t have a dog in the fight, do their job. Give them the benefit of the doubt.