More and more research reports assert that sport experience has an influence on shaping the personality of athletes. This paper aims at validating the connection between personality and sport experience. The research subject of were young Polish male athletes aged 20–29, out of 42 sports disciplines, with sport experience ranging from 3 to 12 years. In order to test the personality of the research subjects, a five-factor model of personality called the Big Five was applied. Statistical calculations and analyses were (...) carried out with ver. 25 of the IBM SPSS Statistics software. The research has shown that all personality traits correlate in a statistically significant way with sport experience : there is a negative correlation of sports experience with neuroticism and a positive correlation with traits such as extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Thus, we have identified a relationship between sport experience and personality traits of the researched Polish male athletes—the longer the sport experience, the lower level of neuroticism and higher levels of extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Duration of sport experience has a considerable influence on forming the personality of Polish male athletes. However, the interpretation of just the results regarding high level of extraversion and conscientiousness distinguishes Polish male athletes from the Polish male population of non-training people. (shrink)

By conceptualizing Sexual Selection, Darwin showed a way to analyze intra-specific individual differences within an evolutionary perspective. Interestingly, Sexual Selection is often used to investigate the origins of sports, arts, humor, religion and other phenomena that, in several languages, are simply called “play.” Despite their manifested differences, these phenomena rely on shared psychological processes, including playfulness. Further, in such behaviors there is usually considerable individual variability, including sex differences, and positive relationship with mating success. However, Sexual Selection is rarely applied (...) in the study of play, with exception to what is concerned as infant training behavior for adult sex roles. We offer an integrated grounding of playful phenomena aligning evolutionary propositions based on sexual selection, which might stimulate further exploration of playfulness within evolutionary perspective. (shrink)

In this essay I develop a case for games as a primitive form of culture and an early arrival at our ancestors’ cultural gates. I analyze the modest intellectual prerequisites for game behavior including the use of metaphor, a reliance on constitutive rules, and an ability to understand the logic of entailment. In arguing for its early arrival during the late Middle and Upper Paleolithic, I develop a case for its powerful adaptive qualities in terms of both natural and sexual (...) selection. I accept ecological dominance coupled with an increasing sense of self as primary sources of selection pressure. I show how these two factors threatened homeostatic balances ranging from low arousal and atrophy to malaise, depression, and anomie. I suggest that an antidote or adaptation was found in culturally-enhanced forms of play — that is, formal, rule-governed games. The upshot of this analysis is a broadened discussion of cultural adaptation from one that often focuses on cooperation, social complexity, and language to other fundamental issues related to survival — namely, increased leisure time, enhanced arousal needs, and the health and physical skills required for a hunter-forager existence. (shrink)

Doping scandals can reveal unresolved tensions between the meritocratic values of equal opportunity + reward for effort and the “talentocratic” love of hereditary privilege. Whence this special reverence for talent? We analyze the following arguments: (1) talent is a unique indicator of greater potential, whereas doping enables only temporary boosts (the fluke critique); (2) developing a talent is an authentic endeavor of “becoming who you are,” whereas reforming the fundamentals of your birth suit via artifice is an act of alienation (...) (the phony critique); (3) your (lack of) talent informs you of your proper place and purpose in life, whereas doping frustrates such an amor fati self-understanding (the fateless critique). We conclude that these arguments fail to justify a categorical preference for natural talent over integrated artifice. Instead, they illustrate the extent to which unsavory beliefs about “nature’s aristocracy” may still be at play in the moral theatre of sports. (shrink)