Elite darts performance and the social influence of real crowds and simulated crowd noise

While the effect of missing audiences has been studied numerously in team sports with diverse effects, studies on individual performances are rare. The current investigation analyzes performances of professional dart players in (a) the absence of spectators, (b) the presence of real crowds, and (c) artificial crowd noise (simulated crowds) substituting live spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical evidence suggests that performances in coordination-based accuracy tasks are negatively impacted by the presence of others. Therefore, we hypothesize that performance of elite darts players deteriorates in the presence of a real audience (RA) in comparison to no audience (NA) and simulated audience (SA). https://dartsorakel.com provided the data of professional tournaments played from 2018 to 2021, which included N = 26,724 individual performances from k = 442 players (98.8% male). How RA and SA impacted checkout percentage (CP) and three-dart average (3DA) was analyzed using separate multilevel models, adding various control variables. Competing with audiences (SA and RA) resulted in decreased CP with an effect of β_{stand_real} = - .20, p < .001, and β_{stand_sim} = - .14, p < .001. 3DA increased with SA, β_{stand_sim} = .08, p < .001, and decreased with RA, β_{stand_sim} = - .07, p < .001. The results show that real crowds appear to have a negative impact on darts performance, yet effect sizes are small.