RESEARCH ARTICLE What Motivates People to Do and Watch Sports? Exploring the Effect of Sex, Age, Partner Status, and Parenthood Menelaos Apostolou 1 & Rafael Lambrianou 1 # Springer International Publishing 2016 Abstract People exhibit a strong interest in doing and watching sports. This interest has triggered intensive theoriz- ing and empirical research on its evolutionary origins. The present research advances this line of work by testing existing and novel predictions derived from evolutionary hypotheses on the motivation to do and watch sports. Study 1 identified 36 motives for doing sports, including being entertained and to show-off abilities, and 27 motives for watching sports, in- cluding to support one’ s team and to improve mood. Study 2 applied principal components analysis to classify these mo- tives into nine broader motivation domains with regard to doing sports and into six broader motivation domains with regard to watching sports. On this basis, several predictions derived from evolutionary hypotheses were tested on each domain of motivation. In several domains, significant main and interactions effects of sex, age, partner status, and being a parent were found, which are consistent with the predictions of the evolutionary hypotheses. Keywords Evolution of sports . Spectator lek hypothesis . Motivation to do sports . Motivation to watch sports . Parental choice Introduction People exhibit a strong interest in sports which is manifested in the considerable time they allocate in doing (Guttmann 2004), watching (Gantz et al. 2006), and reading about (Quinn 2009) sports. This interest is found across different cultures and across different times (Deaner and Smith 2013; Guttmann 2004; Kyle 2006) and has initiated theorizing about its evolutionary roots (Miller 2000; Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). Recently, there have been several attempts to understand the evolutionary roots of such interest (Apostolou 2014; Balish et al. 2013; Lombardo 2012) which were followed by testing specific hypotheses (Apostolou 2015; Apostolou et al. 2014; Deaner and Smith 2013; Deaner et al. 2012, 2014). The pur- poses of the current work are to advance this line of research by identifying the primary domains of motivation to do and to watch sports, and to test existing and novel predictions de- rived from hypotheses on the evolution of sports in these domains. Hypotheses on the Evolution of Sports A sport can be defined as an organized activity which requires physical skill, where two or more individuals or teams com- pete to win, according to agreed-on rules (Deaner et al. 2015; Deaner and Smith 2013). There have been several evolution- ary hypotheses which attempt to account for the motivation to do and watch sports. In particular, it has been argued that individuals are motivated to engage in sports in order to dis- play their physical abilities to interested parties who look for mates for themselves and their children, to improve their skills, and to form useful coalitions (for an extensive review, see Deaner et al. 2015). An evolutionary framework which encompasses all these hypotheses indicates that there are considerable fitness bene- fits (i.e., increases in survival and reproductive success) in doing and watching sports, which predicts a strong motivation for engaging in such activities—a prediction which is * Menelaos Apostolou m.apostolou@gmail.com 1 University of Nicosia, 46 Makedonitissas Ave., 1700 Nicosia, Cyprus Evolutionary Psychological Science DOI 10.1007/s40806-016-0071-7