The book Scorecasting had a chapter on home field advantage. They covered the work a variety of researchers put together and did some cross-comparing to test the various theories about why the home team wins more often and their primary conclusion was unconscious referee bias. (They didn't look our stadium but I'm sure if they did, they would find our crowd noise to be a huge factor in our HFA considering Football Outdiers came to that conclusion using the same types of research). This coincides with some psychological aspects of our brains, like with us all having a part of the brain (I forgot what its called) that interrupts everything we hear and see as initially true. This basically means that tens of thousands of fans booing would indeed provide a degree of negative reinforcement toward making calls against the home team and thus influence their behavior whether anybody wants it to or not.
I suppose that we as Seahawks fans could gripe about this more than other teams considering if it were possible to have completely unbiased referees, we'd be one of the few teams to still have an advantage at home.. but that's too much whine for me. In the end, the same biases that assisted in us losing this game are the same biases helping us win more games at home and whether this is working for us or against us overall depends entirely on how high our potential play-off seeding is.
