As the biggest sports event of the year approaches (4 days 5 hours 48 minutes 32 seconds away as of this writing), the black cloud that’s been hanging over the NFL all season continues to darken. In a season that started with the Ray Rice fiasco, the NFL is now involved in a cheating scandal surrounding the New England Patriots and the possibility that they deflated their footballs to gain an advantage against the Colts in the AFC championship game.
The scandal began with league officials, then moved up to the coach and quarterback, and has now escalated into exchanges between opponent players and team ownership. Every member of the media is overwhelmed by this massive story line during a week when generally, stories must be extracted out of very little substance.
The consensus of former players, the media (outside of New England), and the fans seems to be that the Patriots cheated and that quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick were a part of it. The questions then become why and how.
Why would they cheat?
As mentioned previously, the worst experience in sports is to “have” a win and lose it, a concept known as loss aversion. The Patriots were heavily favored to win their AFC championship game and as the final score indicates, the game was not particularly close. Professor Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School suggests that perhaps being favored so heavily contributed to the pressure to win and motivated them to cheat. Combine the general pressure to win in the NFL as in any sport with this added pressure and the result is Deflategate. Or Spygate. Or any other sports cheating scandal which has probably become famous this week.
Another reason for cheating, even unnecessarily, may be based on the findings of four researchers (including Schweitzer) published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2013.
Previous research believed that cheating does not feel good, primarily because it creates a gap between doing what one “wants” and what one “should” do. This dissonance is difficult to tolerate and produces negative emotions. However, based on several interesting studies, the researchers found:
- People indeed predict that cheating will lead to negative emotion
- However, cheating increases positive emotion
- This increase is true even without financial gain
- This increase is true even for “unnatural” cheaters, i.e. people who were brought into cheating via a confederate.
This “cheater’s high,” as they call it, may explain the Patriots cheating past and present, including games like last week’s that involved little risk of losing.
So maybe the pressure to win or the feeling high helped motivate the Patriots to bend the rules. But how did they sleep at night? There are several possibilities, but one is based on a basic psychological principle.
How could they cheat?
Sigmund Freud, famous for many reasons in the world of psychology, also contributed a tremendous amount to the layperson’s vocabulary. In his theory of psychopathology, he believed that people were often confronted with internal struggles, and used what he called “defense mechanisms” to resolve the struggles. One of these defenses, which has made its way to the common vernacular, is “rationalization.” In common terms, rationalizing is when “controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable – or even admirable and superior – by plausible means.”
Perhaps the Patriots involved in the scandal were able to cheat by thinking, “Hey, everyone does it!,” not unlike the way many grade-school students cheat on tests.
Why is everyone so excited?
So why has this story excited the fans and media so much? Well, first, it attacks the integrity of the game. But also, many fans resent the Patriots in general. Part of that resentment is due to their unbelievable success, winning three Superbowls, appearing in another three (including this year), and appearing in nine AFC championship games, all in the last 15 years. Additionally, the Patriots’ history of cheating has many fans and media members believing that with this scandal, justice will finally be served.
In a previous discussion, a phenomenon known as “schadenfreude” came up. Schadenfreude is the pleasure derived from another’s misfortune” (2013, p. xi). In his book on the topic, psychologist Richard Smith explains that justice is one of the motives for this mischievous joy. Similarly, media burned by Belichick’s harshness and fans still upset over the last scandal may be salivating at the possibility of suspensions or forfeited draft picks by the Patriots.
So will the cheating Patriots disappoint fans and emerge victorious?
4 days 3 hours 8 minutes 12 seconds left to find out…
References
Ruedy, N. E., Moore, C., Gino, F., Schweitzer, M. E. (2013). The cheater’s high: The unexpected affective benefits of unethical behavior. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 105(4), 531-548. doi:10.1037/a0034231
Smith, R. (2013). The joy of pain: Schadenfreude and the dark side of human nature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Andrew Muschel, MS, is a fourth-year clinical psychology doctoral student at Long Island University Post. His research and clinical interests have included religion, addiction, technology, and trauma. He has presented research related to those topics at major psychology conferences in New York City, Los Angeles, and Honolulu.
Andrew recently decided to merge one of his primary hobbies, sports fanship, with his professional passion. After years of listening to radio talk show hosts offer every angle on the latest in sports, he considered providing the psychological perspective on all those stories. He has also become interested in general questions, for example why people are attracted to sports. On this blog, he attempts to address those questions and more.
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Last reviewed: 28 Jan 2015