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by: Alex Williams, MMATorch Senior Contributor
Future boxing Hall of Famer Nigel Collins argues that Manny Pacquiao's abandonment of hard living ("drinking, gambling and cockfighting") has made him less ferocious in the ring. It's possible! Scribes raised similar questions when MMA fighters like Rampage Jackson found religion. And as Collins notes, we can think of many boxers who were as reckless outside the ring as they were in it (John L. Sullivan, Mickey Walker, etc.).
But we have to be careful that we don't mistake a handful of examples for a correlation. Even if we could show a correlation, that doesn't mean that hard living causes people to be more aggressive in the cage or ring. Truth is, we don't have sufficient data to argue either for or against that claim. But perhaps psychological science can refine our thinking on the matter.
Psychological researchers who study personality traits find that five in particular are essential for understanding and predicting human behavior. They are known as the Big Five. A meta-analysis found that folks who engage in "deviant behaviors" (substance abuse, theft, rule breaking) differ from folks who don't on just one of the five constructs: conscientiousness, or impulse control. Those who behave in a "deviant" fashion rate are less conscientious on average, or less able to control their impulses, than those who don't.
What about the relationship between conscientiousness and fighting? One study[PDF] indicates that extreme sports athletes are more conscientious than athletes in other sports and non-athletes. So to the extent Pacquiao or MMA fighters' disengagement from deviant behaviors indicates an increase in their conscientiousness, we might expect them to be more likely to engage in extreme sports, not less.
Now, a (possible!) increased tendency to participate in extreme sports is not the same thing as an increased likelihood to be ultra-aggressive when fighting. And again, these are tenuous, correlation-based relationships. The data in no way warrant a claim that "becoming religious makes ones more ferocious in the ring." But they don't warrant the opposite claim, either.
Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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