WILLIAMSTOWN — "It's me. Hi. I'm the problem, it's me."
So Taylor Swift sings in "Anti-Hero," the chart-topping lead single from her 2022 album "Midnights," which won Swift her record-breaking fourth Album of the Year Grammy Award this past Sunday.
And if research conducted in a recent Williams College class is any indication, she will, in fact, be the problem — at least for large number of viewers during Sunday's Super Bowl telecast.
"For many people, seeing TV coverage of Taylor Swift at NFL games does make them enjoy football less," psychology professor Steven Fein said in an online release. "Sexism, political ideology and belief in conspiracies are among the factors that may fuel the anti-Swift feelings."
Swift is widely expected to be at the Super Bowl, cheering on her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs' tight end Travis Kelce. Not that you didn't already know that.
Since Swift and Kelce started dating in summer 2023, their relationship has made international headlines.
Within a few months of their dating, figures like former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Fox News host Jesse Watters pushed a theory that the relationship was a "psyop," or psychological operation to assist President Joe Biden's presidential reelection. Fein noticed a frenzy of social media fury whenever Swift appeared in the audience during National Football League games.
"I'm not saying everybody who doesn't like her is because of [sexism], but a sizable number," said Steven Fein, a Williams College psychology professor who conducted research on anti-Taylor Swift feelings in football viewers.
"Why are so many people so angry about a few seconds here and there?" Fein recalled wondering during a recent interview with The Eagle. "I didn't know if it was just because any fan they keep showing over and over would be distracting. Or something about women, not prototypically seen as football fans. Or Swift specifically."
So in November, he presented his question to the 16 students in his Experimentation and Statistics class.
Fein, who first taught this course at the college 33 years ago, has always given his students research options.
He offered this year's class the choice between a student body-specific experiment that might have been conducted in Williamstown's Tunnel City Coffee, and the Swift-Kelce option; the overwhelming favorite was the latter.
Going in, there were theories on what the results might be. "Some of the students thought the Swift photos would not have much impact on people," Fein said. "And there were different predictions about how liberals would respond."
For his part, Fein wondered if the negative feelings existed among small groups of people, and only felt exaggerated by social media.
The class used Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace that provided access to 500 people of varying demographics of people.
"We didn't ask them what they specifically thought of Taylor Swift," he said. "She was just mixed in to a whole bunch of images from games."
Fein was surprised by just how widespread the sentiment was. It also tended to fall within political lines and, especially, amongst people prone to conspiracy theories.
Subsequently, 250 more people were asked explicitly how they felt about Swift at NFL games. The results corroborated the first survey, present regardless of age, but less for women.
"I don't think it's going to affect ratings at all," said Fein, who will be watching the big game this weekend. "But assuming she shows up at the game, I'm more confident that the strong reactions some people have are not limited to a fringe few who make a lot of noise. A lot of people are feeling some way or another about it."