The organized sports of contemporary life are high public drama and grinding anonymous routine.

They are imbued with deep emotion, constant mental calculation, and enormous physical exertion. Sports
are watched and played throughout the world with passion and partisanship. They are pursued for profit, patriotism, and personal compulsiveness. They are spontaneous moments of pure action and visceral
performance, but they are always embedded in long chains of stories and statistics. And sports are everywhere implicated in structures of power, both personal and collective—the variable powers of an
athlete to compel her body with her spirit, of an owner to command a team with his financial clout, of fans to will a victory with their cheers. For any scholar of modern life, they offer splendid conjunctures
of embodied actions and institutional forces.

Sports have long been embedded in community life, the educational system,the mass media, the corporate structures, and the nationalist sentiments. For over a century, they have been a crucial intersection of
school pedagogy, corporate aims, media constructions, gender relations, and patriotic feelings. The chapters in this book highlight a wide range of sports,
and together, they offer a significant window on to the ways that the sporting life animates.

outdoor adventure and endurance sports like mountain climbing, Arctic exploration, and sailing; martial art sports like judo and karate; and professional wrestling, both men’s and women’s. Finally—and at
many points in the twentieth century the most popular and lucrative of all. The earliest academic attention to sports was limited to those working in physical education, whose priorities were practical,
pedagogical, and policy-related. The National Research Institute of Physical Education was formed in 1924, but its studies and surveys were intended to assist physical education policy planning and
coordinate the training of teachers. Only recently have sociologists and historians taken the lead, broadening the focus on school physical education to sports and body culture across the society and shifting
the perspective to critical, academic research.

The modernized body, which was destined to achieve self-control and self discipline through a process of self-examination, established on the one hand a separate and rational modern society by forming the
non- violent, enduring body. On the other hand, this establishment of modern society necessitated the presence of modern sports as a social enclave for physical violence. We could say that modern society is
characterized by a bi polarization of the body, in which the enduring ascetic body and the violent desiring body exist simultaneously. An example of this dualism lies in the emergence of sadism and
masochism in the urban culture

The Love of the Game

The role of a sport in the lives of its fans is as complex as the role of sports in society at large. In many ways, a sports team becomes an extension of the fan’s identity, self-esteem and sense of belonging.
Teams and their players are connected to their fans like family; they are a community, like any other. There may be neurological reasons for this, one theory being that mirror neurons in the brains of fans
align with and reflect those of their favorite team members. Win or lose, they share the same feelings of honor or failure and react accordingly.

Which Is Better, Support or Competition?

What kinds of social media networks are most effective for promoting healthy levels of physical activity, competitive interactions or supportive social contacts? My colleagues and I at the University of
Pennsylvania conducted a study to answer this question, and what we found will surprise you. One kind of social media network dramatically improved people’s exercise behavior; the other backfired.

The main findings, first published in Preventive Medicine Reports (2016) and explored with practical applications in How Behavior Spreads (2018), show that social media can indeed help people to exercise
more, but only if it is used in the right way. Implemented incorrectly, social media can actually backfire and lead to less exercise.

Chicago Booth Review

Comparing rates of gym attendance among participants in different experimental groups: control condition (individuals alone) vs. team support condition vs. individual competition condition vs. team
competition condition. Participants in the individual competition and team competition conditions performed the best overall.Source: Chicago Booth Review
The most encouraging finding was that social comparison — that is, friendly competition — was really effective at improving people’s levels of physical activity. The most surprising thing we found was that
social support networks actually led people to exercise less. Our results showed not just that support was worse than competition, but that it was worse than giving people nothing at all. Social support
backfired, actively preventing people from going to the gym.

Why competition worked so well

Competition works because we naturally compare ourselves to people like us, and use them to evaluate whether we're doing better or worse than we should be. If we see others doing better — e.g., getting
back into shape faster, going to more fitness classes, and losing weight more quickly — it gives us a new goal. Peer competition is very useful for goal-setting, and for creating aspirations for getting into
shape faster. Done properly, social media networks can create a positive reinforcing loop in which everyone’s activity motivates everyone else to keep up their routine. This creates a natural "social ratchet
effect," in which each person’s activity feeds back to generate more activity among the others.

Why social support backfired

Social support had a negative effect on participation because people did not use their peers as sources of social comparison, but instead as sources of encouragement. While the upside of encouragement is
that group members can help to pull each other up, they can also pull each other down. What we observed was that the least active members of the group created a kind of social inertia that pulled the others
to exercise less. Without friendly competition as a motivation for exercise, people were relying on their interactions with others to keep them motivated. We found that people can then use inactivity among
their online peers as an excuse to lower their own levels of activity, which creates a downward spiral of activity in the network.

How do these findings compare with previous research?

Looking back over most of those studies, what I have found is that even studies that emphasize the value of peer support networks to encourage physical activity typically include some form of implicit social
comparison within their interface. For instance, people may see a record of other people's fitness activity, or their cumulative number of days of participation, or their total number of calories burned, etc.. In
other words, while it might seem as if the reason for the people’s success in these programs was the social support tools the programs offered, a closer look will typically reveal that there is some kind of
social comparison feature built into successful programs. Even when we think that social support is helping, usually the explanation is that people are being helped along by subtle competitive signals they
receive from other participants.

Tips and advice for your own life

Once you put a plan into action, it's easy to create competitive motivations. Our study offers an easy-to-follow template for doing this. “Health buddy” networks can be created by using any online platform
where people can use an interface to record their program progress, or daily exercise activity, and compare themselves to others. Interestingly, one thing that we found most striking about the positive impact
of social comparison is that the most successful participants in our study did not even have any social media tools for talking to each other: We only gave these participants the "bare minimum" exposure to
their peers’ profile information and their daily records of activity. Even without any communication technology or interaction, social comparison among peers was enough to increase exercise rates by nearly
100 percent.

In How Behavior Spreads, I show that this social comparison effect works equally well to improve exercise levels regardless of whether people are put onto groups that compete with other groups, or whether
people act as individuals competing with other individuals. From yoga to weight lifting to spinning, the dynamics of social comparison work the same way for groups and for individuals. What matters most
for increased performance is that people can evaluate themselves against an “outgroup” of comparable peers.

Tell Us About Life Online?

ideas spread faster than those of other people. Notably, this emphasis on speed is regardless of whether their idea has any long-term benefit for the people who adopt it. In other words, the metric of success is
the speed of diffusion, not the ultimate impact of a diffusion process on people’s lives. To understand what this means for the future of ideas and behaviors online

spread quickly because they are easy and familiar. They can easily diffuse across millions of people, just like a virus. By contrast, complex contagions, such as social cooperation and environmentally sound
business practices, require a little more social reinforcement to get us to adopt them because they require a little more effort on our part

we also have the ability to create new kinds of productive spaces online that promote social learning and behavior change. Putting our efforts into building these spaces is an important next step for shaping
the evolution of social life online.