Playoff beards and unwashed uniforms: a scoping review on athletes’ superstitions and rituals
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Athletes commonly engage in ritualistic behaviors such as performing certain actions, citing verses, and holding objects/items when preparing for competitions. Despite the prevalence of these ‘pre-game/practice routines’ or ‘superstitious behaviours’ in sport, we have relatively little knowledge on what they are or how their use may enhance athletic performance. The present PRISMA-based scoping review aims to identify and analyze literature on athlete rituals, superstitions, and pre-game routines. Articles were screened for the following inclusion criteria: (a) written in English (b) published in peer-reviewed journals, (c) available in full-text form, and (d) examining sport, and specifically athlete populations. A secondary objective involved creating a framework for researchers and practitioners to identify, define, and categorize superstitious behaviors and beliefs. The final dataset included 33 articles with athlete samples from 11 different sports. Key findings indicated that superstitions may arise as a coping method for anxiety resulting from the uncertainty of sport, and praying was identified as the most common superstitious ritual within the articles examined. Findings from this study may inform directions for future research to benefit athletes and related stakeholders across a range of performance and developmental outcomes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it