Who attends sports events?

In the 1993 General Social Survery, respondents were asked if the attended a sporting event during the last year:

ATTSPRTS 473. Next I'd like to ask about some leisure or recreational activities that people do during their free time. As I read each activity, can you tell me if it is something you have done in the past twelve months? Let's begin with attending an amateur or professional sports event. Did you do that within the past twelve months?

When you compare this with respondents' degree, we see that the more education one has, the more likely one is to have attended a sports event during the last 12 months:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		ATTSPRTS
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
DEGREE	0: LT HIGH SCHOOL	27.2 74	72.8 198	100.0 272
	1: HIGH SCHOOL	54.8 425	45.2 351	100.0 776
	2: JUNIOR COLLEGE	64.2 61	35.8 34	100.0 95
	3: BACHELOR	69.8 157	30.2 68	100.0 225
	4: GRADUATE	78.8 82	21.2 22	100.0 104
	COL TOTAL	54.3 799	45.7 673	100.0 1,472

It's expensive attending sporting events, so people without college degrees are less likely to be able to afford it. It has also seemed to me that attending sporting events is a popular activity with the upper middle class.

But a very interesting thing happens when you compare this with the respondent's Wordsum score (the ten word vocabulary test which I use as a proxy for IQ):

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		ATTSPRTS
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	.0 0	100.0 3	100.0 3
	1	16.7 2	83.3 10	100.0 12
	2	21.2 7	78.8 26	100.0 33
	3	43.4 23	56.6 30	100.0 53
	4	47.1 49	52.9 55	100.0 104
	5	45.9 61	54.1 72	100.0 133
	6	62.4 136	37.6 82	100.0 218
	7	68.7 103	31.3 47	100.0 150
	8	63.2 67	36.8 39	100.0 106
	9	60.0 51	40.0 34	100.0 85
	10	54.3 25	45.7 21	100.0 46
	COL TOTAL	55.6 524	44.4 419	100.0 943
Means		6.43	5.68	6.10
Std Devs		1.83	2.26	2.07
Unweighted N		524	419	943

It turns out that attendance at sporting events peaks at Wordsum 7 and then falls as the respondent becomes smarter. This is not what one would have expected based on the fact that people with graduate degrees are most likely to have attended a sports event.

My theory is that, as people become smarter than Wordsum 7, watching sports becomes less interesting.

Comments

[Dennis Mangan]

As one data point, spectator sports bore me to death. But I don't know my Wordsum score.

[The Superfluous Man]

Perhaps playing sports is less common among smarter people, making them less avid spectators. Can the GSS provide an answer?

What proportion of graduate degree holders are still around colleges (i.e. inflating their sports attendance)?

Maybe an income-sports comparison is in order?

[Turambar]

A few observations-
- how long can we use this 15 yo data?
- I think your solution is the most correct one- sports are expensive
- how long can we use this 15 yo data?
- We might get a lot of immigrants and elderly among the 'no college' group. These people would be less likely to attend sporting event.
- 35% of the people dropped out between those two questions. That fact that you cant back the non-respondents out of q1 decreases validity.
- Perhaps people with the most developed verbal sense dont have a comparable appreciation for kinitic sports. Wider IQ measurements might not show this.

[Peter]

Huge variation among different sports is a near-certainty. At one extreme, you have The Most Important Sport in the World (a brief pause while we get on our knees and metaphorically lick the metaphorical anus of the decidedly non-metaphorical (drumroll please) Almighty NFL). Those who attend Almighty NFL games in person are of course the men at the very zenith of the scrotum, er, totem pole, a collection of uber-Alpha, cartball-playing, alphanumeric-driving, scoring-with-the-hottest-chix-at-the-trendiest-nightclub, testosterone-dripping SCA's. Just the sort of exalted beings who get hard at the very thought of grinding schmucks like us under their feet. And it goes without saying that almost all of them have very high Wordsum scores indeed.

Average fans of the Almighty NFL have no chance whatsoever of getting tickets, so they watch the games on TV while sucking down beers and scarfing buffalo wings and nachos, though of course I use the word "games" advisedly as a game in the Almighty NFL is an endless array of TV commercials for cars, beer, life insurance and limp-dick drugs, punctuated by occasional brief bursts of actual play.

Of course, American men like me who do not like the Almighty NFL are a pathetic bunch of losers and faggots not worth further discussion.

Baseball is several notches below the Almighty NFL when it comes to fan I.Q. and just about everything else. America's "national pastime" has turned into your Dad's sport, a semi-obsolete relic that appeals mainly to senile old men with prostates the size and consistency of billiard balls. As tickets to baseball games are generally available in most cities, and can be surprisingly inexpensive, the sport still holds on to an Everyman sort of appeal when it comes to in-person attendance. Baseball fans most likely cluster near the middle of the Wordsum intelligence spectrum.

At the bottom you have the Second Most Important Sport in the World, namely NASCAR. Thanks to absolute brilliant management the sport has gone well beyond its traditional Southern redneck roots. The days are long since past when the typical NASCAR fan had three teeth and impregnated his 14-year-old cousin. Even so, despite superb marketing toward more upscale audiences, the people who go to NASCAR races still have a strong Joe Sixpack aura about them (not to mention a strong body odor). I'd expect that most of them cluster pretty far down the Wordsum intelligence scale.

Wouldn't money just enable people to attend sports events? Liking sports might correlate negatively with IQ, but money being an enabler masks that.

[Half Sigma]

You can still see the mets for as little as $5, and you can take the subway there.

What a bargain.

http://mlb.mlb.com/nym/ticketing/seating_pricing.jsp

[Young Man]

Just walk down to you local park and you'll find most sport is free to attend.

[Jack]

I got a theory. What stadiums seat the most people?? It's not NFL, it's college football. Some of the stadiums seat 100,000 people or more! I'm sure many of the fans are alums of huge state universities; they are above average but not super high IQ.

I am a sports fan but I don't think I've gone to a game in the past year; I'd usually rather watch on TV. It would be interesting to see breakdowns by sport (NASCAR may be bringing down the numbers).

Peter, I don't see why you hate the NFL so much. It seems a little irrational. If you want more action, there's basketball and hockey.

[David Alexander]

It's quite possible that the high proles are watching the game from a local sports bar or on a large screen TV in their own home. The high proles could afford go to the game, but the seats in their price range offer poor viewpoints of the game so why bother?

BTW, who attends the minor league events in smaller cities through out the country? I'd imagine that these smaller cities have those on the lower average side of the wordsum score, and somebody must be attending those sporting events.

[Peter]

Peter, I don't see why you hate the NFL so much. It seems a little irrational.

I don't like the sport because it's basically television's whore, constant time-outs and interruptions made to accommodate commercials. But that's not the point. I don't really like hockey either, except of course for the fights, but that's more or less irrelevant because American society does not pressure men to like hockey. But football? Unless you worship the Almighty NFL you're treated as some sort of faggot. There's no free choice allowed.

The high proles could afford go to the game, but the seats in their price range offer poor viewpoints of the game so why bother?

In the case of the Almighty NFL, attending games in person is essentially impossible unless you spend thousands of dollars for season tickets, which usually requires years and years on a waiting list. Your only other chance is to pay massive amounts to scalpers.

[superdestroyer]

I believe that many of the NFL season tickets are actually owned by business and expensed as business expenses.

I find football the worst game to attend in peson since the crowd is overwhelmingly middle age white males who are drunk. It is not very enjoyable to listen to some drunk ass curse for three hours. The same goes for the sports bar except that the parking is cheaper.

College football also has the drinking problem and the problem of hangers on (those who are fans of the football team but have no other connection to the school, see Alabama, Tennesse, Nebraska, Penn State, etc).

[Peter]

Some very good news on the sports front. It looks as if the Almighty NFL may soon be dethroned from its exalted perch as The World's Richest Sports League!

What attracts major-league moguls to the [English] Premier [soccer] League is its popularity, particularly in broadcast markets - the current contracts, including domestic and overseas rights, are worth about £2.7bn over three years, or £45m per club per year. By contrast, the NFL, the world's richest sports league, has broadcast contracts worth $3.1bn per season, or $97m per franchise. At today's exchange rates, these are roughly equivalent sums per club. Even better, the Premier League is enjoying rapid growth from overseas sales, something the NFL is unlikely to do. The Premier League might soon even challenge the NFL's pre-eminence in revenue.

That would be too wonderful for words. Link to story.

[PP]

HS

Can I recommend that you use the NLSY? While this does NOT have information regarding everything you look at here, it does have much more reliable IQ estimates (The AFQT is a percentile that can be directly correlated with IQ percentile. So a 95 on the AFQT is about equal to a 125 IQ). It also has time series data. I used it to analyse income and wealth over time, and found that as people age, IQ correlates with increasing difference in income. There are lots of other interesting variables in the NLSY so I suggest you download the data.

[Half Sigma]

Using the NLSY is a great idea. Now if only UC Berkely would stick it behind their easy to use web based analyzer...

As only an armchair sociologist, using the NLSY requires a big investment.

[madbomber]

I heard somewhere that NASCAR was the world's biggest sport, if you want to call NASCAR a sport. I don't know that for sure, and I'm certainly not going to waste time looking it up.

IMO, any organized sports are far more fun to play than to watch, and collecting stats on NFL players, to me, is little different than collecting Pokemon cards or playing World of Warcraft. Kind of nerdy. I'va also never been called a fag for not following the sport religiously.

I never really understood how a person could be into a NCAA team without being into the college itself. In fact, many fans have no interest whatsoever in higher education. To me, the thing that make's Duke special is it's academic tradition...the fact that the Blue Devils put up a good squad is only a fringe benefit for the student body. Additionally, some really mediocre schools have very good sports teams. I don't see how you could be proud of a school for making it to the Rose Bowl when the entry criteria was an SAT at or above 1000, epsecially when you don;t play for the team!?

I'm rambling, I know. I'll shut up now.

[Kevin]

Take another look at that question: "Let's begin with attending an amateur or professional sports event."

I'd answer "yes" to that question because I play rugby roughly one out of every three weekends, but I haven't been a spectator at a ticket-selling sporting event since ... 2000, maybe?

[trumwill]

Madbomber,

Whether there is stigma attached to not following sports (NFL in particular) has been the subject of pretty intense debate around these parts. Some of it seems to depend on what part of the country you're in and whether you're in a metropolitan or rural area.

So if you don't mind my asking, what part of the country are you in (northeast, midwest, great plains, south, mountain west, southwest, or pacific coast) and are you in a city (of more than, say, 200,000) or the countryside?

[Brandon Berg]

HS:
NLSY data isn't that hard to use. It took me about an hour to figure out how to use the software they supply for extracting the data to a CSV file, and then another hour or so to write a Perl script to analyze the data. Once you get past those hurdles, it's pretty easy.

[Steve Sailer]

Maybe a big fraction of the grad degree holders are schoolteachers, who are more likely to attend school sports events?

Certainly, at the highest IQ levels, interest in sports is much lower than at the moderately above average levels found among, say, corporate managers.

[SFG]

Well, there's an anti-sports culture among both humanities and science intellectuals, I think. Even conservative ones; ever seen Jerry Pournelle blog about sports?

[Peter]

When I was at Penn Station this afternoon to get my train it was full of team-jersey-wearing Rangers fans on their way to the playoff game at the adjacent Madison Square Garden. Mindful of this discussion, I got a good look at many of them. For the most part, they looked like ordinary folks, nothing like the ultra-Alpha high-testosterone Almighty NFL crowd. And they must've been hard core fans too, seeing as they were wearing team jerseys to a sold-out playoff game.

Of course hockey is a sissy sport totally unlike the super-Alpha Almighty NFL. If you took the biggest toughest "enforcer" from an NHL hockey team, the sort of player who's on the roster specifically for his fighting skills, and had him suit up and play in an Almighty NFL game, he'd last about two minutes before being carried off the field on a stretcher.

[SFG]

A lot of proles dig the NFL as well as the corporate elite (and yes Peter, I hate those suit-covered guys too).