Michelle Schoenleber

There are a lot of Green Bay Packers fans out there, including me. In fact, we constitute one of the biggest subgroups on Reddit (more than 33,000 followers), and about 360,000 Packers fans can even consider themselves part-owners of the team. (Sadly, not including me.)



When I think about Packers fans, mostly positive terms come to mind — friendly, cheerful, intensely loyal and yes, sometimes entertainingly nuts (no matter how cold at Lambeau, there always seems to be at least one guy wearing nothing but paint on his chest). Implicit in my thoughts is that these are ways that Packers fans stand out, ways that we are somehow a little different from everybody else.

But, of course, I’m biased. Every semester, I teach my undergraduates at St. Norbert College about people’s tendencies to think positively about their in-groups and to seek out and give more credit to information that confirms what they already believe. Given that I am a person, I have these tendencies as well. So I know it is possible that Packers fans are not as wonderful or as unique as I think we are.

As a psychological researcher, there was really only one thing for me to do. I started tackling questions about Packers fandom scientifically, recruiting 156 Packers fans representing 23 states last year to tell me about themselves and about how they respond to Packers games in real time (among other things). Here’s a little of what I have learned so far.

We’re not totally different, but we might not be just like everyone else, either. I started by comparing Packers fans’ personalities with preexisting data collected by other researchers from a nationally representative sample, allowing me to look for differences with regard to what psychologists call the “Big Five” personality traits. You can remember them as OCEAN: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. When it comes to two of these traits — conscientiousness and extraversion — Packers fans in my study were just like everyone else.

But there were also differences. Younger Packers fans (younger than 30) were more agreeable but less open than people of similar ages in the general population. In other words, these fans were especially kind, trusting and modest, but they were also fairly conventional and had narrower interests overall than young adults in the U.S. more generally. Packers fans ages 40-49 shared this tendency toward conventionality and narrow interests, but they did not report the final difference that I found — Packers fans of most ages were less neurotic than the general population. In other words, Packers fans reported being more emotionally stable and better able to cope with stressors than did the people in the nationally representative sample.

OK, so fans were telling me they cope effectively with unpleasant events. I decided to take a closer look at how they reacted to a particular unpleasant event — Packers losses. During 10 games in the 2015 regular season, Packers fans told me how they were feeling before and after the games. Packers fans felt largely positive leading up to kickoffs, reporting moderate-to-high levels of happiness and calmness, as well as a small amount of pride. They endorsed little negative emotion; they felt somewhat anxious, but reported essentially no anger, shame, guilt or sadness. Turned out that we lost five of those games, which was convenient for me as a researcher (and painful for me as a fan).

Because they were feeling pretty good to begin with, winning did not affect Packers fans’ emotions much. They did get happier and felt less anxious. But let’s talk about those losses: They did hurt. Fan happiness, calmness and pride all dropped; they did not bottom out, but the decreases were statistically notable. Plus, fans stayed anxious and also started feeling somewhat angry and sad.

Does this mean fans are wrong, that they really are neurotic and do not cope effectively? No, not necessarily. My study was not perfect. (Researchers know that no study ever is.) For one thing, coping is about how people manage negative emotions. I do not know how long fans’ negative emotions lasted or what they did about them, so I cannot really know how well they coped last year. Additionally, fans might be effective at coping in their lives overall, which is what the “Big Five” would measure, even if they do struggle to cope with Packers losses specifically.

Clearly, the research on Packers fans is not complete. There are many more questions to ask, and so my lab at St. Norbert College launched the 2016 season study right as the Green Bay Packers were arriving on campus for training camp. This season, among other things, we’re looking for fans to tell us about their Packers-related traditions. Which traditions are most common? How important are traditions to the fans? Would it make fans uncomfortable if they were prevented from engaging in their traditions?

Additional findings from the 2015 season are — and will continue to be — posted for fans to enjoy as we continue working with our data. Take a look and consider joining us for this season’s study at http://peprlab.weebly.com/2015-packers-fan-study.

Michelle Schoenleber is assistant professor of psychology at St. Norbert College. She is exploring the qualities, experiences and behaviors of football fans — especially, but not limited to, Green Bay Packers fans.