The Bad Apple Effect
- awalker187
- Oct 21
- 5 min read
The Philadelphia 76ers were on a terrible run of form.
It was the 1972-73 NBA basketball season, they'd lost six games in a row and were busy losing again.
The coach Roy Rubin knew he had to make a change.
One of his players that night was the notoriously hard playing defensive forward John Q Trapp.
Trapp had joined the team at the start of the season and came in with a bad reputation.
During his recruitment the 76ers assistant coach warned that he was “absolutely uncoachable".
But despite the concerns, the team had taken a risk on recruiting him.
With the game going badly coach Rubin turned to Trapp to tell him that he was being substituted.
Trapp shook his head, saying, “No, man. I’m staying in the game.”
He turned to look at his friends in the crowd and when Rubin looked over he saw a man stand up and open his coat to reveal a gun.
Trapp stayed on the court.
And the team lost again.
John Q Trapp had a history of disturbing behaviour.
After being suspended for missing practice earlier in the season he spent that game drinking bourbon and taunting his teammates.
He’d also once called in a fake bomb threat to avoid being fined for missing a team flight.
The Philadelphia Bulletin journalist Alan Richman said, "What a scary fellow. Let me put it this way: I came back from Vietnam a captain with a Bronze Star, and I was scared of John Trapp. He really did frighten me."
Trapp’s negative effect on what was otherwise a tight-knit group of players was obvious.
The teams’ leading scorer Fred Carter said, "Trapp played with a chip on his shoulder, but the chip was too big. He was just an unhappy soul and unhappy souls are sometimes difficult to be around."
Spoiling the Barrel
Trapp was a classic bad apple.
And as the saying goes “One bad apple spoils the whole barrel”.
When psychologists were looking to measure the damaging effect of bad apples on team effectiveness, almost fifty years after Trapp’s last game they chose the NBA for their research.
They tracked the performances of all the players for the 2013-14 season.
They measured how frequently the players worked together so they could measure if they were improving with familiarity.
And they used the players' social media profiles to assess how narcissistic they were.
“Narcissism is characterized by high agency, a desire for power or influence over others, and low communion, a lack of interest in warm and caring interpersonal relationships.”
“Narcissists’ pursuit of admiration and success often comes at the expense of those around them. Narcissists are willing to use and abuse other people to get ahead such that they ‘trade interdependence and closeness for individual status and esteem’.”
They found that if teams had a lot of narcissists, or one extreme narcissist, there were fewer passes and they won fewer games.
Teams with high levels of narcissism barely improved as they played together across the season.
But teams with low levels of narcissism improved significantly over time.
It was a similar trend when a team had a highly narcissist player in a key role, except in that case there was almost no improvement at all.
Again with low narcissists in the key roles, the teams were able to improve significantly.
Slackers, Downers and Jerks
Bad apples don’t just prevent teams from improving, what’s striking is how they can quickly pull whole teams down.
A 2006 study into team dysfunction identified three types of toxic behavioural characteristics, ‘slackers’, ‘downers’ and ‘jerks’.
Will Felps, from the Australian School of Business who led the research says, “If someone’s consistently and persistently displaying these behaviours, the group is likely to collapse.”
Slackers (Withholders of Effort)
Withholders of effort, or social loafers, intentionally dodge their responsibilities to the group and free ride off the efforts of others.
This behaviour creates an inequality, and other team members not wanting to be the ‘sucker’ reduce their contributions towards the level of the worst contributor.
Downers (Affectively Negative)
People who continually express a negative mood or attitude have a significant effect on morale.
Bad is stronger than good - the rule of thumb is that positive interactions need to outnumber negative ones by a ratio of 5:1. Where a positive emotion will wear off relatively quickly a negative feeling will last more than five hours.
Jerks (Interpersonal Deviants)
People who detract from the group’s social and psychological environment by violating interpersonal norms of respect.
Members depend on each other to take advantage of efficiencies and if one person can’t be trusted the effectiveness of the team drops.
And it’s distracting, as distrust of a group member requires increased monitoring.
Like negative emotions, trust is also asymmetric, easier to damage than it is to build.
All of these negative behaviours had measurable effects:
Teams with a bad apple perform 30% to 40% worse than teams without a negative individual.
Morale dropped 40% in teams that have to cope with the negative behaviours of just one individual.
Even when a team was made up of high-performing individuals, the introduction of a single negative member led to a significant drop in productivity and cohesion.
Teams with a negative member saw creativity and problem-solving drop by 50%.
No Dickheads Allowed
John Q Trapp’s aggressive, negative, and erratic behaviour had a significant effect on the 76ers.
After the gun incident, the team kept losing, a streak that eventually hit 14 games.
And it wasn’t an unusual losing streak - they only managed to win nine games in that whole 82-game season.
The 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers are now infamous for being the worst team in NBA history.
With two months left in that dreadful season, the 76ers cut John Q Trapp form the team.
And when the rest of team were told the news, everyone on the bus stood up and clapped.
The polar opposite example of a sports team might well be the 2010-16 All Blacks.
The New Zealand All Blacks rugby union team is the most dominant team in world sport.
Since their first game back in 1903, they've won 76% of all the games they have played.
Their most successful period was between 2010 and 2016 when they won 93% of their games, never lost a home game, picking up two World Cups along the way.
During that time they employed a bare-footed mental skills coach called Gilbert Enoka, who famously introduced a “no dickheads policy”.
“You can have all the strategies in the world, but in the end, what will enable you to overachieve – or underachieve – is your culture,” he told Adidas’s Gameplan A magazine in a 2017 interview.
“A dickhead makes everything about them. Often teams put up with it because a player has so much talent. We look for early warning signs and wean the big egos out pretty quickly.”
“Our motto is, if you can’t change the people, change the people.”
John Q Trapp and the 76ers:
Anthony Olivieri, "Inside the worst team in NBA history, the 1972-73 Sixers", ESPN (2023)
Charley Rosen, "Simply the Worst", SLAM (2013) Ron Kantowski, "Former UNLV player John Q. Trapp knew NBA fame, infamy", Las Vegas Review Journal (2015)
Dave Caldwell, "‘A slow motion nightmare season’: Mad Dog Carter and the NBA’s worst-ever team", The Guardian (2023) Will Felps and Bad Apple research: “Groups and Teams - Will Felps (UNSW Business School)”, Youtube (2013) Fleps, W., Mitchell, T., Byington E., “How, When, and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups”, Research in Organizational Behavior (2006)
All Blacks: "Maguire brings in legendary 'no dickheads' All Blacks guru to give the Blues a mental edge for Origin mission", The Roar (2024)
