Does Professional Athletes' Humility and Activity on Social Media Impact Team and Player Performance? Evidence from National Football League

摘要

In recent years, the number of professional athletes who use social media has increased. Through social media platforms, they can communicate with their followers, enlarge their fan base and build their brands. In spite of the positive role of social media as a communication channel between athletes and fans (Williams and Chinn 2010), there is also a concern about the potential interfering effects of professional athletes' social media activities on their own as well as their team's performance. The concerns are broad but include simple distractions, disturbances stemming from misbehavior, inappropriate viewpoints, and public criticisms, among others. In this study, we focus on how professional athletes' humility (or lack thereof) revealed in their social media posts and their social media activity relate to individual player and team performance. Given the prior findings of the positive effect of humility on athletes' performance (Austin 2014; Tong et al. 2016) and insights from the anecdotal evidence, we propose the following research questions: (1) Are professional athletes who post less humble content likely to have worse individual and team performance? (2) Is there a negative relationship between the number of posts and player performance?