The Phillies say the Trea Turner ovation game sparked their turnaround. There’s a science behind that.

The students sat in right field, a group of 40 college kids at Three Rivers Stadium cheering wildly for everything Dave Parker did from hitting for extra bases, to tracking down fly balls, to simply leaving the dugout.

“Every movement,” said Charles “Bud” Wise, who took his class from Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., on a field trip in the late 1970s to the old Pirates ballpark on Pittsburgh’s North Shore.

Wise’s class — Human Behavior in Organizations — was in the school’s department of economics and business administration. The assignment to cheer for Parker was meant to show students the importance of positive reinforcement. It worked as Wise said Parker was the star in both games of the doubleheader, with the students supporting his every move.

“I don’t think we can take credit for that but it certainly reinforced our point,” Wise said. “The point to the students was that positive reinforcement and recognition is so important in organizations to spur positive performance. That was the theory.”

Nearly 50 years later, Wise’s teachings — the power of positive reinforcement and recognition — received some validation this summer from Pennsylvania’s other ballclub. It’s been well acknowledged that Trea Turner’s season went from miserable to stellar after the fans in South Philly greeted him on Aug. 4 with a standing ovation despite a costly fielding miscue two nights earlier and career-worst offensive numbers.

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Turner entered that night hitting .235 with a .657 OPS. The crowd cheered, Turner rallied, and his OPS in the final 48 games of the regular season (1.057) was the fourth-highest mark in the majors. His home run in Tuesday’s rout of Arizona in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series was Turner’s third blast in October. He has the second-best OPS (1.526) in the postseason. It all started with positive reinforcement.

“That’s exactly the point,” Wise said. “It enhances your self-esteem when you get that recognition. So it gives you confidence. In anything, whether it’s sports or any organization, if you feel good about yourself and you’re confident, you do better.”

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The ovation, J.T. Realmuto said, didn’t just boost Turner but helped the entire team. The Phillies were on a 88-win pace before Turner was cheered. They had a .585 winning percentage over their final 53 games, a 95-win pace over 162 games. They’ve now won seven of their eight postseason games and enter Thursday two wins shy of a second straight trip to the World Series. The cheers were for Turner but everyone felt the positive reinforcement.

“When one person is getting booed, it feels like we’re all getting booed out there,” Realmuto said. “To see the fans get behind him and give him that show of support and then him come through and be successful almost immediately from that point, that was just like a weight lifted off the entire team’s shoulders.”

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“I think it showed on the field. We played much better. We played more free. Trea especially was a completely different player after that. It was definitely a pivotal moment in our season, and it was special to be a part of and get to watch it.”

Wise’s class traveled in vans to Pittsburgh, which is a little more than two hours from the liberal-arts campus that sits 30 miles east of Altoona. They brought signs for Parker and cheered him all game. The students were instructed to exclusively cheer for Parker as Wise wanted to show them, many of whom were finance majors, the effect positive reinforcement could have. The social experiment even received a brief write-up in Sports Illustrated. Parker, a rightfielder, eventually caught on and tipped his cap to the fans behind him.

“He was definitely aware that we were there,” Wise said. “He probably didn’t know what we were up to.”

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They later went to a hockey game in Hershey and channeled their energy toward Nelson Burton, the enforcer for the minor-league Bears. They did the same shtick, cheering wildly when he hopped over the boards to begin his shift. When Burton was in the penalty box, Wise passed him a note to explain why they were there.

“There were very few fans there and we were standing up,” Wise said. “I’m sure he was curious like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Our focus was, ‘Let’s just see if we can influence their performance just by paying attention to them in a positive way.’ ”

They brought signs for Burton, just like they did for Parker, and cheered him just as loud. They treated the players like Philly treated Turner, seeing if their cheers could have the same effect that the South Philly ovation seemed to have. And when the hockey enforcer started a brawl? You could blame it on positive reinforcement.

“I don’t know if we spurred him to get into a fight,” Wise said. “But when he got into a fight, the students just went wild.”