By Karl Leif Bates
A new study out of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience that compared personality traits and sports-watching habits has found that the Cameron Crazies probably aren’t crazy at all.
Couch Potato contest in Chicago, 2009. Steve Janowski via Wikimedia Commons
As part of a much larger series of studies that gathered psychological and biophysical measures from more than 500 people, Duke psychologists Gregory Appelbaum and Stephen Mitroff looked through the data to see if sports fans were true to their stereotype as slothful shut-ins.
Running a series of regression analyses on a sub-set of 293 participants, they compared self-reported consumption of sporting events with other traits, including hormone levels, exercise frequency, extroversion, and autism.
Bottom line: Sports fans are MORE extroverted and active than non-fans. They are no more likely to have attention deficit disorder or to be hyper-testosteroned.
But they still may be prone to buffalo-wing breath.
CITATION – “What is the identity of a sports spectator?” Gregory Appelbaum, L., et al. Personality and Individual Differences (2011). doi:10.1016/j.paid.2011.10.048