Why We Love Sports: The Role of Psychology And Storytelling

When the Philadelphia Eagles won their Super Bowl in 2018, the fans stormed the streets, took down lampposts, and turned over parked cars. When the Spanish National Team won the World Cup in 2010, large groups in Madrid partied in the streets day and night for over a week.

Sports fans have very different ways of celebrating a championship win. For everyone, however, a championship victory has the same effect: It makes us look at our team in a whole new light.

Specifically, it makes us think much differently about the path that got them there. Take basketball for example. If your hometown team finally wins the championship, how do you feel looking back over the regular season? You can’t help seeing the workings of a championship team in the making.

At the time, that loss to lowly Bobcats may have brought sadness and pessimism about the team. But in retrospect, you can “clearly” see it as an important building block. That victory on Christmas Day was just nice holiday entertainment. But now you see how it signified the caliber of a championship squad.

The wins built momentum, and the losses built character. When you find out the journey ends in victory, it will always seem like a victory march.

A complex series of events all seem to make perfect sense when considered in retrospect. But why?

The Psychology Of Storylines

Life is messy, but we find patterns and construct storylines to help make sense of it.

This is similar to the concept of the “interpreter”, an idea pioneered through looking at the bizarre behavior of Split-Brain patients. Since the two hemispheres are severed, the right hemisphere can be given a task (e.g. go into the kitchen) that the left hemisphere isn’t aware of. If asked why they’re heading into the kitchen, only the speaking left hemisphere can respond. Instead of feigning ignorance, the left hemisphere makes something up (e.g. "I was thirsty so I’m getting some water") to make sense of their behavior.

Split-brain patients provide an interesting window into the psychology of storytelling

Source: Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

We're all prone to this type of thinking. Like the interpreter effect of the left hemisphere, we all have the tendency to interpret information as being part of a larger story or pattern. In everyday life, this is referred to as the narrative bias. And as we’ve seen with sports fans, this is especially true when we look back: after an event unfolds, we interpret the past in a way that makes this outcome seem logical.

This is what leads us to see the ‘winner’ as the inevitable champion all along. And when this bias maps onto a societal level it leads to ‘winner worship’: seeing the stars as being categorically different from the rest of the field, and recognizing them as such. In this way, the winners are given the largest salaries and endorsement deals, followed by steep diminishing returns for the non-star athletes.

But is this distribution of rewards and recognition justified? When we examine the details, we see that what separates winners and losers is remarkably slim. In addition, the role of luck - defined as factors completely outside of one’s control, play an unappreciated role.

The Influence of Luck on the Narrative Bias

These insights come from recent research by Pawel Sobkowicz and colleagues, who examined the margins of victory in the 100-meter dash. This competition is particularly ripe for such an investigation, based on three factors.

Milliseconds can be the difference between winning and obscurity

Source: Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash

For one, it's a sport that has prided itself on ‘pure’ individual merit. All athletes are given identical competitive conditions, and unlike many team sports, there are refereeing decisions that can impact the outcomes. Secondly, there’s an especially steep decline in recognition between first-place finishers and everyone else (can any casual sports fan name another sprinter not named Usain Bolt?). And lastly, the margins of victory, in objective terms, are exceedingly small. For example, in the 2016 Olympics, there was just a .12 second difference between first and fourth place; less than a 1% difference.

This work compared the actual finish times of the 100-meter dash competitions with a computer simulation that determined success by a combination of intrinsic talent and unpredictable luck. The results indicated that luck indeed played a role: accounting for roughly 5% of the overall variance.

One might argue that this is a relatively small effect. But consider what this looks like, extrapolated onto the sports world more generally. If luck plays a noticeable role in a stringently regulated competition like the 100-meter dash, what kind of impact does it have for ‘messier’ team sports such as basketball or football?

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The Role of Surprise in Storylines

We naturally think of champions as the true deserving victors, categorically ahead of their rivals. This leads us to think of championship teams in a much more positive light, and star players in much more exalted terms.

The narrative bias makes sporting outcomes feel like a work of fiction: "surprising, yet inevitable"

Source: Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

But digging deeper, we find that the space between winners and losers is not only incredibly small but significantly influenced by luck.

Great works of fiction strive for endings that are simultaneously unpredictable and satisfying. As the American novelist Flannery O’Connor once said “story endings should be surprising yet inevitable.” The final reveal is a surprise, but in retrospect, makes perfect sense.

Unlike fiction though, the outcomes of sports can’t be predicted ahead of time. There's no book, and no script. That’s one of the beauties of sports, which keep us glued to the games: Even the meekest of underdogs, against all odds, will have their day.

Despite this, however, sports have a way of heeding O’Connor’s words. Their outcomes, however unpredictable, still feel like a great work of fiction: “Surprising yet inevitable.”

And for that, we have the narrative bias to thank.

This post originally appeared on the consumerism blog, MJISME