Sometimes, a sticker isn't just a sticker.

Heading into the 1967 season, Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes dumped his program's red helmets and brought in the now-iconic silver headgear. With the new garb, Hayes instituted a new policy: Individual players’ contributions – those that helped the team win but might otherwise go unnoticed by traditional statistics, like a key block on a touchdown run – would be rewarded with a small buckeye leaf sticker. (It's now trademarked by the university.)

What were they supposed to do with these decals? Hayes instructed his players to affix them to the shiny metallic backsides of their new helmets.

What seemed like a simple nod of recognition has now become a time-honored tradition. In all, 22 Division I FBS teams currently use helmet-sticker rewards. Yet these decorations are much more than small tokens of thanks. They embody a rite of passage, with a player’s status among his teammates measured by how heavily adorned in stickers his helmet becomes during the course of a season.

Now, a study published this month in the online journal PLoS ONE, has given a fresh perspective on this practice: When small rewards become visible trophies of status within a group, male players change their approach in competition, sacrificing their own best interest to serve the needs of the team.

If these results extrapolate to competitive sports, it’s possible that helmet stickers could be subconsciously driving players toward team behavior through deeply rooted psychological mechanisms.

In the PLoS One study, Xiaofei Sophia Pan, a doctoral candidate in economics in Daniel Houser’s lab at the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, or ICES at George Mason University in Virginia, designed a few experiments to determine how a group of college students valued certain prizes, and how that value changed during competition.

When a reward was offered during the experiment, the prizes were always small, either a Haagen-Dazs ice cream bar or a unique mug with the ICES logo that was not available for purchase at the campus store. By first asking a subset of male and female participants how much they would be willing to pay for each prize, Pan made sure the group didn’t have an inherent bias toward one of the rewards. And at first blush, the group valued them the same.

The remainder of the volunteers was then divvied up into four-person teams, and each participant was given $20 at the start of the game. For 10 rounds, players had to decide how much of their experimental money to contribute to the team’s communal pot. For every $1 contributed to the group, each team member received 40 cents on the dollar at the end of the study.

The game was all about reading one’s opponents, as cooperation only paid off if everyone on the team followed suit. So if all the players kept their money in hand, there would be no communal funds to split, while if everyone went all-in, each player would end up with $32 – a $12 return on investment.

When a round was over, players saw anonymous results of how much money the other members of the team had contributed. and could adjust their strategy if they desired. Also, the participants rated their teammates, on a scale from zero to 10, according to how much they approved of their teammates' contributions.

The higher the number, the higher their opinion of that person (at least in theory). And the more points that players accrued from their teammates' ratings, the more likely they were to win the prize.

Before the game began, the players knew which prize was at stake – the mug or the ice cream bar – or whether they were in a “no prize” control experiment. Regardless of which piece of swag was being offered that period, prizes were always privately awarded. But the researchers required those who won the ice cream bar to finish eating it before they returned to the rest of the group.

The mug winners, on the other hand, carried their spoils back to the experiment room before the next testing round began. Though none of the participants spoke to each other, the mug revealed the game’s finest team player to the rest of the group.

The researchers found that when the mug was the prize, the men in the group – but not the women – fought harder to win, so they more readily threw in all their cash during the game, vying for the highest possible ratings from their teammates. And when competing for the mug, the males cooperated more with each other, instead of plotting and scheming against the rest of the group.

Pan thinks the findings show that the males viewed the mug as a displayable trophy to the rest of the group, and their desire to win the affection of their peers spurred them to shift their behavior away from self-interest toward a strategy that was better aligned for team success.

Pan likens the results of this study to anthropological findings about humans. From a survivalist point of view, it would be in a person’s best interest to fend for himself or herself. Yet evidence supports the idea that altruistic behavior can indeed benefit a species, particularly when the selfless deeds are reciprocated. But as Pan pointed out to Wired.com, in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, “people continued to share even without getting anything [tangible] in return.”

But what they did earn, Pan continues, was “respect and status" among peers. For those carrying a Y-chromosome, an elevated status might boost their chances to reproduce with the group’s females, as well as make other male adversaries think twice about challenging them.

In essence, reputation may help to develop and retain the “alpha male” distinction, but that may not necessarily be a bad thing, since the alpha's actions may ultimately benefit the group. As Houser told Wired.com, “It's exciting to discover that competitive impulses, which can sometimes have negative social connotations, also have this very positive upside potential. One wonders if it might be possible to direct the energy from other human drives towards making the world a better place.”

Tens of thousands of years ago, Pan guesses, hunters may have kept a tusk or skin from the animal they killed as a trophy. Helmet stickers may well be the modern-day manifestation of males’ innate desire to mark their status, explaining why the tradition is so valued in team sports like football.

Clearly, a fullback laying out his body to take a punishing hit from a linebacker 30 pounds heavier than him is not in his best interest. Yet it will benefit the team immensely as his tailback scoots to the end zone unscathed.

Even still, nice as the sticker may be, it’d be hard to believe that the fullback is solely after a novelty that’s traditionally popular with small children. But one key point that Pan and Houser have shown is that the value of rewards – even small ones – changes dramatically once status and competition are factored in. Stickers aren’t the only factor driving team spirit, but small rewards that boost status seem to blur the lines we typically define between ego and team play.

That said, truly extrapolating these findings to college football may go out the window, if the Buckeye leaves ever go the scratch-and-sniff route.

Citation: Pan XS, Houser D, 2011 Competition for Trophies Triggers Male Generosity. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18050. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018050

Image: buckeye50.com