For many athletes, sports are a haven for passion and resilience, an institution for unending personal growth and accomplishing goals. They inculcate leadership, while forcing players to rely on one another for success, and they allow individuals to engulf themselves in a tightly knit community, instigating powerful, lifelong friendships. But, ultimately, amid the tears of defeat and the throat-scratching screams of success, they propagate a single commandment—follow the rules, or be penalized—given that the obvious imperative for all sporting events is that they must be fair and equal for all participants. Thus, officials, without a doubt, must be impartial.
Indeed, as officials within a sport become swayed, implicitly or explicitly, to a particular team, the institution itself wholly deteriorates, and the positive lessons of fairness, kindness, and resilience under pressure cease to hold weight. This lack of impartiality may be drawn from a wide array of biases borne inside and outside of the arena. Officials may find them rooted in the school or city each team seeks to represent; the demographic makeup and physical size of the players; or, perhaps, the mere color of their jerseys. However, while all of the aforementioned concerns of biases are certainly valid, and many of them likely play a critical role in unjust arbitration, my analysis focuses solely on the effect of jersey color on perceived aggression, and the moral and ethical ramifications dovetailing that phenomenon.
In accordance with an augmenting array of scientific studies and quasi-experiments, many contend that officials for collegiate and professional sporting events possess a statistically significant and appallingly dramatic prejudice both against players in dark jerseys and in favor of players in light ones. However, according to Gregory D. Webster, Geoffrey R. Urland, and Joshua Correll, researchers from the University of Florida, Toravner Research and Design, and the University of Chicago, respectively, these biases have been shown to solely affect “aggressive penalties,” rather than “nonaggressive ones,” such as having too many players in the rink simultaneously (277), and they rarely concretize themselves in anomalic goal counts (278). After exploring decades of data from the National Football League and the National Hockey League, Mark G. Frank and Thomas Gilovich, researchers at Cornell University, argue that teams donning black jerseys consistently have more penalties than their peers in any other color (76), forcing them “near the top of their leagues in penalties” (78). Moreover, in randomized scientific experiments, after viewing choreographed tapes of comparable plays from defenders in black jerseys and white jerseys, both well-experienced college students and trained officials ranked those in black as “significantly more aggressive… [and] marginally more dirty” (81). One must not ignore, however, the dual reality of athletes’ self-perception and officials’ perception of those athletes, both of which, according to Frank and Gilovich, augment in aggressiveness when the athlete wears black. This helps to reveal why players in black uniforms both “receive harsher treatment” from officials (81) and, equally importantly, “express more aggressive ideation” (82). Altogether, this data yields an unambiguous understanding of color-based prejudice on the court: While players in black may find themselves minimally more aggressive, they still remain victims of unfair and unjust treatment from officials.
Given the sanctity of athleticism explored in the introduction, any match featuring arbitrary and unnecessary systematic advantages allotted unfairly to one team instigates a breakdown of any ethic within the game. Partiality and prejudice on behalf of the officials reward negative behavior, teaching all advantaged athletes that acts borne of selfishness and entitlement, embodied in aggression, yield marginal success. Granted, not everyone may note all penalties rooted in prejudice, especially since these judgements appear to be rooted in officials’ own humanity—onlookers likely share their biases (Frank and Gilovich 83)—but these calls are nonetheless unjust, regardless of their small scale. Furthermore, despite the lack of conscious noticeability of this implicit prejudice, it may catalyze an implicit, powerful misunderstanding on behalf of the players vis-à-vis proper behavior in the match, thereby enabling marginal increases in aggression for all advantaged players. Unfairly prejudiced calls pigeonhole athletes into aggression machines, allowing them to pursue dirty plays as an easy—albeit unfair—path toward scoring. Surely, unfair arbitration of matches challenges the very practice of athleticism itself, and officials who ignore their responsibility of guaranteeing all players equal scrutiny clearly harm both the players and the spectators by enabling and encouraging such unrighteous behavior.
Let us remind ourselves, however, that these categorically unfair and unjust examples of arbitration need not remain a reality for all of athleticism. Were matches to rid themselves of such unfair calls, athletes would likely hone in on their own maturity and development as much as they pursue augmenting their performance. since they would no longer possess the privilege to excuse aggression as solely symptomatic of getting caught up in the moment, thanks to matters as ridiculous as clothing appearance. It is, thus, critical to present strategies to ensure more just officiation, to save the institution from implicit corruption.
Given that the mere act of donning black clothing bears some evidence to augmenting self-perceptions of aggressive tendencies, as well as significant mistreatment from officials, one potential working solution to this injustice is to make athletic uniforms for all teams much more similar, with white as the primary color on all uniforms, adding other colors for minimal accents. Presently, there is no significant public evidence to support that such uniforms propagate any bias toward aggression. The clear downside to this working solution is that it places much of the burden of the officials’ own faults on the players and spectators—players would need to abandon their visual identities to accommodate the officials’ imperfections, and spectators would likely sacrifice their ability to distinguish individual teams, since onlookers are often forced into seats far away from the action. Nevertheless, this seems to be the fastest and easiest solution, for all parties involved, to ensure a fairly arbitrated event.
For a more long-term solution to this phenomenon, it may be worthwhile for officials to undergo extensive anti-bias training. While there is no all-encompassing cure for bias, this serves two major purposes: Firstly, officials would better understand how their unique perceptions of teams distorts their ability to genuinely understand the ongoings of the match, and they would likely work toward improving their own officiating shortcomings. Obviously, jersey color is one of myriad possible arbitrary points for officials to unfairly officiate matches (Webster et al. 279), and this training may address other prejudices officials possess, as well. Secondly, emphasizing that officials must understand much more than merely the rules of their sport may humble officials and remind them that the word of someone wearing a black-and-white striped shirt is, by no means, the epitome of irrevocable, undeniable, and untestable truth.
This brings forth the critical problem undergirding most of my discussion: We, as human beings, endow officials with the privilege and burden of possessing unquestionable impartiality. Obviously, when our affinities are spread toward a specific team, we may wish for the rules to bend in favor of our own fantasies, and we may be led to anger when the official calls against the team we support. However, few question the legitimacy of the role of the official itself, especially when she arbitrates a match unaffected by our own partiality toward a specific team. I contend that we mustn’t entrust any human being with the responsibility of remaining wholly impartial throughout any sporting event. The data are clear that that expectation is simply unreasonable and implausible for sporting officials en masse, given the numerous biases that may affect the official. Perhaps, our greatest lesson, as players, coaches, spectators, and human beings, may be to complain, question, and reinforce our ideations with reasonable evidence. If we cannot reasonably expect an official to remain entirely truthful, we must adjust the social structure of the sport, to give more room to challenges, replays, and discussion, so that everyone may approach a greater sense of impartiality and fairness. This may be more time-consuming and arduous when considering the efforts of all to ensure a fair match. And yet, if impartiality and fairness is truly the quintessential imperative for any sporting event, it must be treated as a right, a responsibility for all involved, to properly address aggression and to ensure that there truly is a level playing field for all, no matter how laborious the task may be.
Works Cited
Frank, Mark G., and Thomas Gilovich. "The Dark Side of Self- and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sports." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54.1 (1988): 74-85. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.
Webster, Gregory D., Geoffrey R. Urland, and Joshua Correll. "Can Uniform Color Color Aggression? Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Professional Ice Hockey." Social Psychological and Personality Science 3.3 (2011): 274-81. JSTOR. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.
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