The effects of audience on sporting performance is something that can be seen occurring around the world and is not limited to a specific demographic or levels of performance. The audience/player interaction and the resultant phenomena that occurs due to this interaction is a really well studied subject in psychology.
In the 1980’s, Forgas, Brennan, Howe, Kane and Sweet explored the audience effects on squash players performance in a natural setting. At the time of the study, this was an area that was relatively under researched, as field studies were a rarity. At the time, studies analysing audience effects typically occurred in a lab and not the environment in which the performance took place.
The aim of the study in question was to study the audience effects unobtrusively, meaning in a way that does not attract attention, using squash players of different standards, and to evaluate the effects of an audience on the performance of a cooperative rather than an individual task. The authors hypothesised that the absolute level of skill would be the most important predictor of audience effects in accordance to Zajonc’s arousal theory. It was also hypothesised that players would differ in their reactions due to differences in absolute and relative skill levels.
“Zajonc proposed a generalized drive hypothesis which addressed both increase and decrease in performance of people in the presence of others. Zajonc argued that presence of others heightens arousal and thus increases an organism’s ability to perform habitual/well-learned tasks. On the contrary, Zajonc argued that heightened awareness acts as a flaw when performing complex/unfamiliar tasks”.
Method – How the authors conducted the test.
For this study the authors selected 40 male subjects (n=40), 20 novices and 20 experts whom were observed unobtrusively in three random conditions:
No audience – No one located in the viewing gallery.
Male audience – Two males observing behind the viewing gallery.
Female audience – Two females observing behind the viewing gallery.
The players were separated into the novice and expert groups by relatively arbitrary means of evaluating performance, though still in an objective manner:
Mean rally length (total number of hits over a five-minute period divided by number of rallies)
Mean rally speed, or total number of “good” hits over a five-minute period
Number of “rim” shots per period
Note: No clear definition or criteria was in place to explain what qualified for a good, bad or rim shot nor was absolute or relative skill level established. On top of this, pairing of players was identified as one being relatively superior or inferior to the other, using the performance criteria above. There was no objective distinguishers between expert and novices.
The main variable assessed was the performance of each player based on a composite index of the proportion of faulty shots (shots leading to opponent scoring/rim shots), to the total number of good shots over a 5-minute period for each condition. This was expressed as a ratio – bad shots:good shots.
Results – What did the authors find:
The authors found that all three independent variables i.e. no audience, male only audience and female only audience all had a significant effect on performance:
Expert players made significantly fewer errors than novices
Super player in each pair performed better than inferior players
The presence of an audience resulted in a decrease in performance across all conditions. No difference between same sex and difference sex audience was noted.
The authors also noted that superior and inferior players reacted differently in the presence of an audience, this was irrespective of whether the players were deemed to be novices or experts. The authors found that the inferior of the two players actually improved, whilst the superior members performance decreased whilst an audience was watching.
The authors proposed that this may be a phenomenon whereby players try to optimise their performance as a unit rather than raising one’s own performance. An audience eliminates what is deemed a “competition only setting” and creates a setting in which the players automatically match their performance somewhat as a unit, which increases the spectacle.
As part of the conclusion, the authors recognised that the presented theories would need to account for further complexities as the theories presented did not explain the phenomena that occurred i.e. the reaction of the players could not be explained within frameworks of existing theories and thus a new theory would need to emerge to explain the reactions.
Limitations to the study:
This study did have various limitations:
As noted above, the ranking criteria was somewhat arbitrary, and no clear definition differentiated the groups.
Players only played for a total of five minutes, with no competitive repercussions. If players were to play to competition regulations the game time would have theoretically been longer and thus increase chances of performance changes to be identified.
Definitions of good shots, bad shots were not established, and thus difficult to recognise and quantify.
Takeaways:
In general, there are some practical take always from this paper and previous research relating to audience interaction:
Coaches should educate their players on the influence of audiences as it regards performance.
Coaches should expose their players to various audiences/stimuluses prior to competition in order to inoculate them to the outside stimulus; as competition should not be the first time in which a player/athlete is exposed to a new stimulus that could have detrimental effects to performance. This means that coaches should scale competition actions in an environment that would replicate the audience/environment that is expected in competition.
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Yours Truly,
Dominic Benacquista - Global Squash Coach
Reference:
Forgas, J. P., Brennan, G., Howe, S., Kane, J. F., & Sweet, S. (1980). Audience effects on squash players' performance. The Journal of Social Psychology, 111(1), 41-47.