This Is Your Brain on Sports summary

No matter which sport you play, there’s generally a winner and a loser. But even when one team seems to lose all the time, they’ll still have devoted fans following them in every game. In fact, these fans can be even more passionate than those of other teams, since people love rooting for an underdog.

There are good reasons for this phenomenon, as it plays into our sympathy for those who are considered weak and our desire for the unthinkable to happen.

In an experiment conducted at the University of South Florida, students were presented with some details about the Israel-Palestine conflict, including different maps of the region. The two nations were then pitted against each other in a hypothetical sporting event.

As it turned out, when students who received maps that showed Israel surrounded and outnumbered by larger Muslim-majority countries, most of them rooted for Israel.

Likewise, if students were given a different map where the main territory was Israel, with its settlements encroaching on Palestinian territory, most of these students would then cheer for Palestine.

An underdog scenario is appealing because it represents the possibility of an unlikely outcome, where a team or an individual might persevere in the face of a daunting challenge. This makes the game more personal, since we often think of our own situation in life as a similar battle.

For instance, when we try to get someone’s attention and sympathy, we’ll often portray ourselves as an underdog trying to overcome impossible odds.

This impulse also sets up an us-versus-them mentality that can lead to both cheering and fighting.

When our team does win, we feel the desire to join other fans and celebrate in the streets like it was a festival or parade.

But this tendency has its dark side as well, and it can easily turn to aggression against the fans of the opposing team or even bystanders with no interest in sports at all. In the end, our desire to belong often goes hand-in-hand with our desire to exclude.