Psych Research Requiremnt

The Home Field Advantage

The home field advantage is best described in sports like baseball, football, and basketball. It has to do with the better performance of players in their comfortable surroundings. A study was performed by psychologists Jack C. Watson II and Andrew J. Katz III from the University of West Virginia. It was published in Perceptual and Motor Skills 2003. These psychologists intended to prove that players with a home field advantage will win more games than opposing teams from visiting stadiums. If you ask any baseball player what the home field advantage is they will tell you it's a familiarity of the environment, the supportive fans, and a good knowledge of referees/umpires. For instance, they know that in a baseball game an umpire may call strikes high and outside. In the same respect a visiting player might not know there is a dip in left field or that the third base line has a bump that will set the ball into the opposite direction. This kind of knowledge can benefit the home team. Some more explanations include the influence of building new stadiums on players. Building new stadiums is believed to give players a sense of "overpayment inequality" (Watson II and Krantz III Home).

Certain methods were used in order to conduct research in this experiment. Psychologists recorded data from three professional sport teams. They were the NBA, the MLB, and NBA. They took attendance and home victory percentages from five years before a completion of a new stadium and five years after during the period of time from 1950 to 1996. To figure out the number of victories you must take the winning percentage and equal it to the number of home wins divided by the number of home games.

After carefully assessing the information the psychologists were able to prove that in MLB, 52.3% of baseball games were won prior to the building of a new stadium and 56.4% of baseball games were won after teams had a newly built