Passion and Overconfidence in Sports Fandom

Previous research has established a link between passion and performance overconfidence in the workplace, suggesting that highly passionate individuals tend to overestimate their capabilities and chances of success. Building on these findings, we conducted a study to investigate whether this relationship extends to sports fandom. We recruited NFL fans of eight playoff teams who were presented with information about the likelihood that the team they were most passionate about (“passion team”) and a randomly selected team (“control team”) would win the Super Bowl. We then asked our participants to make their own predictions about the likelihood of each team winning the Super Bowl. Our analyses revealed that participants were significantly more overconfident about their passion team’s chances of winning the Super Bowl relative to a control team.