The Psychology of Collective Pride

In a recent study done by UC Davis psychologist Cynthia Picket, she found that groups that boast, gloat or denigrate others tend to have low social status or be vulnerable to threats from other groups. Picket, one of the few psychologists around to study what's known as "collective pride," has used her work to explain both the behavior of partisans at a political rally (just think of some of the things McCain supporters have shouted about Obama at recent rallys) and fans at a football game (just think of everyone in the Cleveland Brown seating section appropriately known as the "dog pound"). But it seems to me it can also help explain why winning teams sometimes begin to nosedive without explanation-like the currently dreadful Dallas Cowboys.

To understand why this might be the case it is helpful to understand the work of a few other researchers. Two of them, UC Davis psychologist Richard Robins and University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica Tracy, both who worked with Picket on her recent collective pride study, reported in an earlier, 2004, "Psychological Science" article that the emotion of pride has a distinct nonverbal expression that is unlike the body language of other positive emotions-meaning it is much closer to the body language of negative emotions.

The other researcher is emotional expert Paul Ekland who detailed in his now classic "Emotions Revealed" that facial expression are physiologically tied to emotions. It's impossible to have one without the other. The best example of this may be the fact that very few people can smile naturally on command. That's because there is a tiny muscle beneath the lower eyelid that rises when one smiles naturally. it rises when one is happy and at no other times. It's an involuntary repose. Less than 5 percent of the population can make this happen by will alone. But when it does happen, when that tiny eyefold lifts, there is a correlational dopamine release. A little boost to let you know you're happy.

So how can Picket's work explain the Cowboy's losing ways? For that we need to know a little bit more about their history. The Cowboy's came out of the regular season with the best record in the NFC at 13-3 and then lost to the soon to be Superbowl Champion New York Football Giants. This year, the Cowboys had 12 returning pro-bowlers and were the preseason Superbowl favorite. And their first problem was they let this hype go to their heads.

Coaches always talk about the dangers of believing your own press clippings, but the neurophysiology behind that dangers is what's really interesting. After winning their first three games handily, things started to go badly for the Cowboys. They got easily handled by the Washington Redskins.

Since football teams are, well teams, tightly bonded with shared goals and, many times, beliefs, they are not unlike football fans or political partisans. Since the Cowboys are historically an, um, hyper-confident team-with players often selected for that quality by the very arrogant owner Jerry Jones who seems to like his team to resemble himself-they had already been talking themselves up plenty. Making matters worse were those preseason Superbowl predictions. So when the Redskins started beating them on the field (mostly because Terrel Owens kept dropping passes), suddenly there was a mismatch between the words coming out of their mouths and the facts on the field. Doubt crept in. But the Cowboys, in the week after that game, kept on bragging. Suddenly confidence became braggadocio and braggadocio has a body language associated with negatives, not positives.

Once that new body language of erroneous pride settled in-because it's hardwired into emotions-they were suddenly athletes playing in a bad mood. A problem since hundreds of studies done by hundreds of sports psychologists have found that there's just about nothing worse for physical performance-especially at an elite level-than a bad mood. All sorts of critical components-like speed and strength and stamina-drop in the presence of negativity. Which goes a long way to explaining why the week after the Cowboys lost to a very good Redskins team, they were then decimated by the St. Louis Rams who had yet to win a game until Dallas came to town.