Quantifying and explaining home advantage in sport.

Previous research has identified four factors thought to account for home advantage in sport. These fall under the headings of crowd factors, familiarity with local conditions, travel factors and rule factors. A growing body of research suggests that crowd factors are the most dominant cause of home advantage. The present thesis aimed to extend current knowledge by examining the contribution of crowd noise and officiating to home advantage in sport. Chapter 3 quantified home advantage in multi-event winter Olympic competition, while considering the influence of officiating, travel and familiarity factors. Events employing subjective officiating were shown to enjoy enhanced home advantage, and it was proposed that this could result from partisan home crowds influencing judges to favour home competitors. Chapter 4 tested this proposal experimentally using association football. Participants were asked to judge challenges recorded on videotape either in the presence of crowd noise, or in silence. Crowd noise was shown to result in more fouls against away and less against home players than adjudicating in silence. Chapter 5 replicated the findings of Chapter 4, with the crowd noise causing referees to under penalise the home side rather than over penalise the away side. Two possible mechanisms were proposed to explain the crowd noise effect. Firstly, participants may be focusing upon cue saliency, regardless of its relative diagnostic value. For contentious decisions, this would result in over emphasis on crowd noise. Secondly, participants may be adopting an avoidance coping strategy, avoiding the anxiety of making what the home crowd feel is a `bad call'. Having identified the influence of crowd noise upon officials in football, Chapter 6 expanded upon the methods employed in Chapter 3 by measuring home advantage for five groups of summer Olympic events. Quantifying home advantage for team games demonstrated that the influence of crowd noise resulted in significant home advantage, comparable to that of the subjectively judged events. The lack of home advantage in objectively judged events (controlling for athlete participation) also suggested that the crowds' influence upon officials is the major element of `crowd factors', and not its influence upon players. Finally, Chapter 7 examined the mechanisms underlying the influence of crowd noise upon officials. In addition to a large crowd noise effect, comparable to that of Chapter 5, the effect size was related to an increase in anxiety and mental effort in the noise over the silent condition. The suggestion is that the crowd noise effect was at least partly due to the adoption of an avoidance coping strategy. Participants addressed increased anxiety with both increased mental effort and bias in favour of the home side, avoiding further negative consequences of making a `bad call'. In summary, the thesis provided support for crowd factors as the dominant cause of home advantage, and demonstrated that the crowd is able to influence referees to make an imbalance of decisions in favour of the home side. This crowd noise effect was shown to result in enhanced home advantage, which was present whenever officials had a large input (judging outcome or enforcing rules). The influence of crowd noise was partly explained by participants adopting an avoidance coping strategy.