This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist who studies nonverbal communication. She was a professor at Harvard Business School and is a best-selling author.
Before the opening tip of an NCAA tournament game, an unnamed college basketball player opened his phone and read this message on social media from a stranger:
“Yo no big deal but if you don’t get 22 points and 12 boards everyone you know and love will be dead.”
The message was among thousands documented in a 2024 NCAA study on online harassment in college sports. The player was not identified.
Sit with that for a moment. This player hadn’t yet stepped on the court. He hadn’t missed a shot or turned the ball over or failed to box out. He had simply been assigned a betting line — a prop bet on his individual statistics — and a stranger with money on the outcome had decided to make sure he knew what was at stake.
He went out and played anyway. They all do.
He is not alone. We are in the middle of March Madness — the most bet-on event in American sports, with an estimated $3 billion wagered on this year’s tournament alone.
A 2025 NCAA study found that 51 percent of Division I men’s basketball players had received social media abuse based on their athletic performance — and 46 percent had received negative or threatening messages specifically from bettors. Sports bettors drive as much as 45 percent of all abuse surrounding some major tournaments, arriving before games, during games, and after. Milwaukee Brewers star Christian Yelich told the Associated Press that online abuse is simply “a nightly thing” for most MLB players. NBA players say that regardless of how they perform, harassment is now expected.
We invest heavily in measuring and managing the variables that affect athletic performance — sleep, nutrition, physical recovery. But there is one variable that has been steadily growing for a decade, that now shapes the environment every elite athlete competes in, and that almost nobody is training for. It’s called social-evaluative threat.
Social-evaluative threat has always been part of sport; athletes have always competed under the weight of other people’s judgment. What’s changed is the dose. An athlete in 1995 might hear it from the stands during a game; an athlete today can wake up to hundreds of messages before breakfast. At chronic levels, in an environment where judgment arrives before the game even starts and continues regardless of how well you play, it is no longer just a psychological footnote. It is a performance variable — measurable, consequential and almost entirely unaddressed.
And understanding it may change how we think about performance itself.
The stressor the sports world hasn’t caught up to
Social-evaluative threat is the stress response triggered specifically by the possibility of being negatively judged, criticized, or humiliated by others. In a landmark 2004 meta-analysis of 208 laboratory stress studies, psychologists Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny established that social-evaluative threat is among the most powerful and reliable stress responses we know of — producing some of the largest cortisol changes of any stressor studied, particularly when the evaluation feels uncontrollable.
You can’t argue your way out of it, perform your way past it, or simply decide to ignore it. The body treats it as danger.
But the research on social-evaluative threat was built around discrete, bounded stressors — a speech in front of judges, a test with an audience watching. What athletes are now living inside is something different: a sustained, ambient version of that threat that never fully switches off. Not pressure in a moment. Pressure as a permanent condition.
And here is what sets it apart from almost every other performance stressor: the body never fully gets used to it. It doesn’t fully habituate.
Most stressors dampen over time — the body adjusts, the response fades, exposure helps. But social-evaluative threat is different. A 2023 study by psychologists Kevin Jordan and Timothy Smith found that while general stress responses do show some adaptation with repeated exposure, the cardiovascular and physiological effects of social evaluation specifically persist. Performance evaluation appears to actively resist the normal habituation process. The body keeps treating judgment as danger, even when it arrives every single night.
That matters a great deal for athletes now competing in an environment where judgment is no longer episodic — arriving after a bad game, fading by the next week — but chronic and ambient.
When players like Jessica Pegula and Caroline Garcia describe the steady stream of abuse from bettors — and how hard it is not to carry that into competition — they aren’t describing a mental health problem. They’re describing a performance problem — one the research suggests is structural, not incidental.
You can play well and still open your phone to a hundred messages telling you that you failed someone’s parlay. North Carolina’s Armando Bacot did exactly that — helped his team beat Michigan State and advance to the Sweet 16 in 2024, then found over a hundred messages waiting in his DMs because he hadn’t hit the over on his rebounds prop.
This is a categorically different performance environment than the one we have been studying and training for.
There is also the timing problem, and it may be the most underappreciated piece.
It requires training, not toughening.
Most of what we know about performance under pressure assumes the stressor arrives at game time. But research by Mark Wetherell, a professor of psychobiology and health psychology, has shown that the mere expectation of social evaluation produces anticipatory stress reactivity — meaning the body begins responding before the evaluative event even occurs.
Athletes receiving threats and harassment before they compete aren’t just dealing with a bad mood. The stress response may already be activated before the opening tip, the first pitch, the first serve. What an athlete carries into competition shapes what they’re capable of once they’re there.
For athletes, the most important shift is recognizing that managing evaluation load is itself part of performance preparation. That means deliberate protocols around social media — not just “take a break” advice, but structured boundaries that treat exposure to ambient judgment the way we treat physical fatigue: something to be monitored, managed and recovered from.
Iga Swiatek stopped checking social media after tournaments even when she won, because she recognized that the evaluation was punishing regardless of outcome. That’s not avoidance. That’s load management.
For coaches, it means building recovery from judgment into training the way recovery from physical exertion is built in. It also means taking seriously what the research on anticipatory threat tells us: what an athlete experiences in the hours before competition is not separate from their performance. Pre-game protocols matter more than we think, and they need to account for the evaluative environment athletes are arriving from.