Playing football is a delicate balance between being aggressive enough to drive yourself to win what is essentially a fight (tackling the running back, wrestling to hold or get through the front line, blocking a defender), but not so aggressive as to lose your temper and break the rules. One of the hardest jobs coaches have is to build players up until they are ready to push through pain and exhaustion to win the game, but at the same time hold them in check so that they don’t start committing needless penalties (like unsportsmanlike conduct, unnecessary roughness, or a late hit) or even starting an actual fight and get thrown out of the game.
This brings us to the Pavlovian system. In the first installment of this series, I defined Pavlovian action selection as “species-specific behaviors that one learns to release at the right time”. So, for example, Pavlov’s dogs learned to salivate (a typical response to food) to the bell (a cue saying food was coming).
One of the most interesting discoveries of the last decade is that, in humans, this Pavlovian system is where much of our social interactions come from. It turns out that a lot of Pavlovian learning is related to emotions. We love with our Pavlovian systems. We fight with our Pavlovian systems. Even anger at unfairness seems to come in large part from our Pavlovian systems.
Pavlovian learning actually charges up two components of the decision-making system. There is a motivational component to Pavlovian systems. For example, they change one’s tolerance to pain. They change the amount of effort one puts into a hit, and the speed one runs with. But there is also an action-selection component to Pavlovian decision-making systems, which leads to species-specific responses to cues. When someone knocks you down, you come up and hit them back. When you’re wrestling with someone, you want to get more aggressive than they are and take them down, not stop just because some guy in a striped shirt blows a whistle.
The solution is that humans (and other primates) have developed a number of social cues that can defuse the anger that builds up from aggressive interactions.
One of the best books on this topic is Frans de Waal’s Peacemaking among Primates (Harvard, 1989), which reads like a manual on how to watch football.
In short, primates use grooming touches to cement friendships, particularly in stressful and aggressive situations that they don’t want to escalate. On the other hand, they can use their really good friends to get their aggression out because they know their friends won’t take it as an aggressive move.
Football players are very interestingly armored. They have tough armor on their shoulders, legs, and heads. There are only a few unarmored spots on a player – for example their hands. This leads to one of the two classic peacemaking gestures, the help-up. If a player has been knocked down, either through being tackled, blocked, sacked, or the sumo wrestling on the front line, it is typically the opponent that comes over, reaches down and helps the player up, which, of course, includes the touching of hands. The other classic peacemaking gesture is the infamous butt-pat, in which a player acknowledges the only other really unarmored part of the opponent.
During a game, football players are in a highly charged and aggressive state. They want to get their intensity out. When that intensity boils over, a player will often grab another player, knock heads (armored), and scream in the other player’s face. What’s interesting is that this violent, screaming, armored head-knock is not done on opponents, where it might be taken as an aggressive attack, but rather to one’s own teammates, where it transfers some of that intensity to the other player. The Pavlovian response to being threatened with a face-to-face aggressive scream is to build up one’s own adrenaline, to charge one’s own intensity, and thus to “fire up the team”.
These days, television broadcasts of football tend to show replays and commentary between plays, but they used to just show the actual game. Back when football on television showed these after-play interactions, my wife and I used to be able to pretty reliably tell when a fight would break out by watching whether the teams were helping each other up or only helping their own teammates up. We used to say that we wanted to do an ethology study on football – counting the number of peacemaking gestures (so many butt-pats, so many help-ups), noting the relationship between the violence on the field and those peacemaking gestures (that was a particularly nasty hit, is there a help-up afterwards?). The best part is that identifying the subjects would be easy – football players come pre-numbered for easy identification. We never did the study, but I still think it’d be a lot of fun.
