Sports used to bridge a lot of cultural gaps. You could walk into any bar and ask what the score was and everyone was your friend, regardless of race, creed, or color.
Those days are gone, according to humanities scholars at coastal universities. Even elite athletes are shook by being around anything different from them, they write in a new paper. The authors even suggest their work means business teams may want to group employees by political beliefs. Perhaps restaurants should consider having sections just for Democrats or Republicans.
It could even mean that if you want to see golfers at their Flow State best, the PGA might consider tournaments with all political lefties or righties.
Photo: Storyblocks
The PGA Tour uses random assignments during competitions so the scholars determined the political views of 360 players using campaign contributions, public statements, social media, and voter registration. They then examined results of 66,115 player-rounds from the years 1997 to 2022 based on the player-political tribe mix they were among. Using the Partisan Conflict Index as their guide, they found professional golfers did worse when they were around players with different political views but when playing with people who agreed with them on things like that Israel deserves terrorist attacks or illegal immigrants deserve to be sent home hit 0.2 strokes better per round. That is a lot. For the average pro, shooting 0.11 fewer strokes per round will improve their ranking by one position on the leaderboard, which means 0.2 worse could mean a Democrat is preventing a Republican from making the cut just by breathing. By overlaying times of more rancorous political discourse in culture, they noted the performance gap of players versus Republicans and Democrats not swinging a golf club around each other is nearly 300%.
Gone are the days when you simply stayed quiet so players could focus; now you can’t even think about lowering taxes or the golfer you like might shank the ball. If even professionals can’t keep it together well enough to play their best around someone who disagrees with them, imagine how much better you would do by segregating your foursome.
If this is true, then university claims that they don’t discriminate against Republicans also don’t hold up. They claim Republicans simply self-select out of high-paying jobs where they can be employed for life and conservative people being uninterested in those jobs are why they have lower representation than handicapped and indigenous people in university faculties. This means that instead universities are choosing to get the best performance out of their overwhelming Democratic supermajority by insuring they don’t have to see Republicans anywhere except the Fox News they don’t watch anyway.
Or this is just the bandwagon effect (availability cascade) where humanities scholars are finding an effect because it has been repeated a lot, rather than because it is real.
