Trash Talk

Psychological Excellences

• Part of athletic excellence is psychological.
• Concentration, ability to handle pressure, memory, decision-making and so on.
• Failures of these psychological skills are athletic failings.
• For example:

Psychological Excellences

JR Smith was a worse basketball player because of such mental errors.

“However, it is also apparent that failures to overcome some forms of psychological pressure do not constitute a failure of excellence. For example, an athlete who loses focus in a game upon learning of the death of his child cannot be said to have fallen short of the standards of sporting excellence”

"some forms of psychological pressure are legitimate tests of excellence while other forms are not.”

Is dealing with trash talk a legitimate test? Are you a better athlete if you can deal well with trash talk?

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Psychological Pressure

• Hardy et al. speak of mental toughness as ‘'the ability of some people to continue to strive toward and achieve their goals in psychological circumstances where others “"fall by the wayside”" and fail'’,
• This mental toughness is clearly sometimes relevant to sporting excellence.
• “The question to be discussed as such is what forms of pressure are appropriate to sporting excellence? When does mental toughness constitute sporting excellence, and when is it extraneous to sporting objectives?”

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Two Positions on Trash Talk

• Dixon: ”trash talking is inappropriate as a test of sporting excellence because the pressure it exerts is both morally dubious and unrelated to proper sporting objectives. On this interpretation, the goal of trash talking is to morally degrade the target… it is successful when its target feels so morally offended as to lose focus”
• Summers ”trash talking is a strategic skill consented to by participants as per the social contract of competitive sport”
• Both these neglect how trash talk comes in many forms.

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Forms of trash talk

• (1) Insulting one’s opponent’s performance on the day
• (3) Questioning one’s opponent’s sporting integrity
• (5) Insulting one’s opponent’s non-sporting characteristics
• (7) Insulting one’s opponent’s family members or other intimates
• (8) Goading an opponent to do something strategically inadvisable
• Etc.

The Moral Status of Trash Talk

• ‘Because trash talk is often not meant seriously, and because participants are aware of this, the usual norms that govern speech and are cause for its censure may not always apply. To illustrate this, it is useful to consider parallels between trash talk and Harry Frankfurt’s treatment of ‘'bullshit’’.’
• Bullshit (in the technical philosophical sense) is speech which is unconcerned with the truth. Bullshitting is different from lying.

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The Moral Status of Trash Talk

• “Consider for example the trash talker who, despite having no standing to make claims about her opponent, nevertheless proclaims her own abilities superior or denounces her opponent’s weaknesses in general.”
• This is bullshit. And if the opponent is thrown off their game by it then that is a flaw in the opponent.
• But sometime bullshitting can do too far, e.g. bullshitting about the abuse a family member of your opponent suffered. But it’s hard to draw the line.

Truthful trash-talk

Some trash talk is not bullshit – it’s just truthful talk.

E.g. Larry Bird boasting about his excellence.

Is truthful trash talk better than bullshit? Or is the truth morally irrelevant here?

What Trash talk is ok?

• “Our claim is thus that morally sanctioned trash talk must be evaluated in terms of how it conduces to sporting excellence, either by helping to set challenges or by helping to overcome them: legitimate trash talk conduces to these ends, while trash talk that does not is gratuitous and to be avoided.”
• What cases does this rule out? Cases where trash talk doesn’t help you at all? E.g. when you are already winning big.
• Also, in addition the ‘harmful’ cases of trash talk that goes too far are wrong too.

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What Trash talk is ok?

• Further, Johnson and Taylor think that trash talk that doesn’t help achieve excellence is bad. So, if you trash talk in a way that causes your opponent to mentally collapse and so lose easily then that’s bad, because it’s not conducive to sporting excellence.
• And that’s even if what your saying is pretty anodyne.
• Is this correct?

What Trash talk is ok?

• Johnson and Taylor think that for trash talk to be ok it has to be (i) not harmful and (ii) conductive to sporting excellence.
• This is a fairly restrictive position on trash talk? Is more trash talk than this ok?
• Also, I don’t think they really answer their question of what types of trash talk are legitimate tests. They seem to answer the question of when trash talk is morally ok.
• This paper really left more questions that answers for me.