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Episode 29: Grudges, Sports, and Rivalry
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we got some listener comments and listener questions from last week and we are actually going to go over them the ones left over that we did not get to last week we're going to go over them next week but this week we're going to be talking about grudges sports and rivalry now this out this already sounds kind of cool because for the most part we've been talking about relationships and friendships and and sex and dating basically how people are getting along with each other but today we're going to switch it up a little bit and talk about how it is that people don't get along with each other very good so this all came from an article somebody sent me as a joke because they they told me that this article would go perfect on the show because of all the the touchy-feely stuff that wreck is recommended in the article so this article I read I found from a Wikipedia type website and it talks about how to let go of a grudge so as you can tell dr. Lau from the website and probably from the author you can have a good time by suckiness all right lots of fun all right so number one holding a grudge is hanging on to intense anger or dislike for others based on a real or perceived wrongdoing so here's the guidelines for letting go of grudges number one acknowledge the hurt the pain or the dissatisfaction it's not about denying that a problem exists you have to name the emotions you are feeling like write a journal express your feelings and that way you can understand the event that led to your anger or hurt alright let's go on okay the next one is speak to the offender you have to speak to the person or company who has mistreated you explain your feelings about being overcharged or mistreated and that might lead to receiving an apology or an improvement yeah maybe the yeah let's keep going all right the other one number three is release expectations of people and processes and understand that human beings are imperfect and that we should let it go of let go of attachments of how things should be or how others should behave and that should lower our stress level well you know they're they're they're trying here and they're picking around little little pieces of this and and obviously it's you know somebody's trying to get some decent advice and what we're going to try to do here is to try to understand a little bit more about grudges and sort of where where they come from so but they're the reason we would have a grudge is that that some somebody some entity whether it could be a could be in theory a company but let's thinking let's go back to the natural history of our species in order to understand this emotion and motivational system in other words this is this is a to remind or to explain to people all of your feelings are essentially like parts of your body because they're actually nothing other than parts of your body under a specific set of circumstances there's a neurotransmitters flowing through a circuit that causes a specific feeling so in fact these are physical events and feelings are are every bit the physical event that your elbow is or your fingers are or your ear zone and so your feelings are not sort of willingness there in fact it's the activation of specified neural circuits you know in order to accomplish a specific goal and that goal is ultimately going to be to try to result in you having behavior that will be successful leaving more genes on the planet than some alternative behavior so you can imagine in principle that you could stick your hand in hot water and it might feel just very pleasant and it could be burning and if that was your feeling when you stuck your hand in hot water and you had the genes that built the neural circuit in that way those genes wouldn't be on the planet for very long because people would make mistakes and they would have horrible burns and they wouldn't know that it was happening so your feelings are actually very very tightly specified in order to try to instruct your behavior with respect to situations so whether or not it's you know limping on a sprained ankle instead of walking normally on that ankle because you can't feel any pain that that pain is a device it's a it's an adaptive device just like the ankle is itself so a grudge is the same thing a grudge is not something mysterious bad you know immature you know impulsive stupid or anything else a grudge is a device it's a device built into your nervous system to be activated under a particular set of circumstances and those circumstances are that somebody took advantage of you so they may either forced as something down your throat that you didn't like or they tricked you into it but one way or the other you got the the raw end of a deal and that you consider the way that it was done was very unfair so it may have been through brute force that you could not object to it you didn't have any choice the people that you know the Norwegians came over and they burned your village in southern England and you couldn't stop them okay and so now you hold a tremendous grudge against those Vikings that that's one way to do it another way to do it is somebody cheated you like they told you that they were going to give you 50 coconuts for the 50 oranges that you brought them last week and then they didn't do it they went off and left town and hiked over the next mountain and it turns out they're on a 20-year Trek you know wandering the earth like cane and now you're never going to see them again now then now you're going to hold the grudge so what are these grudges for what they are is there any they're just like any other feeling they're actually there to promote adaptive behavior and in this case its behavior that says remember who it is that screwed you and make sure that you are irritated evening being around them thinking about them so that if they offer you a value proposition that you are very likely to say no you owe me okay and to feel even violent and threatening and in other words you're going to be trying to get even and even the score or signal to them that this is that this was unfair behavior and you're angry about it and so this is this is actually completely adapted behavior and now when we could look at these prescriptions I'm going to have you go over those again for me so that from the light from the angle of understanding that grudge grudge packing is actually an adaptive strategy that was put into our ancestors to try to reduce the likelihood of repetitive exploitation the you know if they came over if they if they cheated you once then you better be on guard against those people or anybody that even looks like them okay so this is where you can get you can get a grudge against a whole host of people because if you had you know one you know these people to wear purple hats well you got screwed by one of these guys in a purple hat and so now anybody that wears a purple hat you're on guard against and you hold a grudge against them and you're entering into any possible trade relationship with them with a chip on your shoulder being very paranoid and alert for the possibility that they could screw you so this is these are the adaptive mechanisms of human nature and so with that in mind now let's go back and look at what these what they said so give me the three little techniques again okay the first three is number one is to acknowledge the hurt the pain or the dissatisfaction don't deny that a problem exists or don't repress your underlying emotions just name the emotion love you not comes a bit from this notion in psychodynamic theory that you repress emotions and that they remain festering if we don't express them blah blah okay this is largely bullshit it's not it's not a tirely bullshit for the following reason and that is that we actually have some communicative pressure inside of us when we feel cheated we want to tell other people in the village and when you don't tell other people in the village you feel an urgency to do so and so if you can if you can tell somebody else and explain it to them this will this is actually part of the process of how you're designed and you can actually feel simply for various reasons some satisfaction from doing this from getting this communicated you've actually communicated at a village that somebody else is not trustworthy you've damaged those other people's reputation partly by telling the person that you've told the notion that you can quote acknowledge your little hurt feelings and name them to yourself and that's going to help this is uh this actually comes this is a derivative of some work done in the 1960s at the University of Chicago by by a psychologist by the name of Eugene Kendall n'd and a technique called focusing and that technique in this case in in most cases it's it's got a little bit of a mild positive effect for people sometimes but it's not going to have a lot of potency here yeah go ahead now so tell me only the neck thing yeah well let's go over that because I'm curious yeah yes I understand that you know naming the emotions I just my personal experience obviously not very scientific yeah but I understand I'm a personal standpoint you know talking to somebody about some issue where you feel wronged is great but why why is this scientifically mostly bullshit oh the the reason is is that the emotion has a purpose so that purpose it's to energize a certain class of actions that are going to be adaptive for the organism now what people like denlon and others have found is let's suppose somebody walks into your office and your psychologist and they're all pissed off okay and they start communicating that that they are angry okay now if I say to them so they're there tell all their transgression about Ivan they're all there what they're all upset about and so then I say to them wow you're really angry it turns out that if I say that that helps and the reason is is that it means that I understand what they are trying to communicate and so they feel relieved that in fact that communication has taken place because that was the point to everything that they were saying okay and that if I go on I say why it feels like you feel like you've been cheated so yes I do feel like I've been cheated okay so in other words the the emotion is shifting because it's accomplishing the communication is accomplishing the social goal that the entire motion is being motivated to accomplish you see so this is why you will find emotion shifting and you will not typically find big-time emotion shifting when people a person just sits sits in their their car all bent out of shape at their at their spouse and says wow I'm angry I'm angry yeah I'm angry like that quote acknowledging the emotion that you are personally feeling in your own private little cocoon isn't going to do anything to process this emotion particularly at all what will process the emotion and where this got confusing for psychologists is that a huge amount of the purpose of having the emotion is to communicate that emotion to secondary parties because so much of the emotions that we have are emotions about relationship issues with other people in the village and so we are lining up support for our negotiations with this third party so when we say things like yes I'm really angry yes I felt cheated and the therapist is always sounds like you've really felt cheated and so yes I do now the person feels relieved because they've actually started to build a coalition and have support they're beginning to get support for their position and so this is why they will find well you know some some shifting of emotion and a release circuit will be going off behind us I see okay makes sense and so the next point is you sprained your ankle if you sprained your ankle and you are you know it does very little to reduce your pain to say well pain is just a perception you know I really feel the pain know that that pain has a as a process that it's going through and it's a tempting for example to have you scream so that you can tell others in your coalition that you're in trouble okay and to elicit the social support so that you can know that you're safe even though you're injured shed sang so these are these are some of the reasons why like if you have a little kid that's on a playground it's all excited right and he's yelling okay and he's making a bunch of noise say well let's just acknowledge what you're feeling oh I'm feeling excited like that's not going to reduce the kids excitement that kids having these periodic explosions of noise coming out of him because periodic noise explosions and children are almost certainly a device for keeping their parents on edge because those screams of children on a playground sound an awful lot like children may be being attacked by predators and so it actually will keep a parent who's half dozing off not paying attention periodically having to shift their attention immediately to make sure the children are okay so this is likely to be the reasons for the periodic unpredictable exuberance that you will hear out of children the shrieking that you'll hear that you won't hear out of a 20 year old it's not going to happen anymore because noise when they don't have parents looking out for them that's why those kids shriek so loudly at the park near where I live yeah all day long that's what we're doing so dawn panic edgy yeah go ahead just as an aside just to kind of question the example and people who let's say they heard their ankle and they just kind of by force of weather like I'm not going to think of the pain I'm just going to focus on something else and you know what's that process there yeah I mean they could they could try to do that but they're not going to find that it's going to mitigate the pain very much your your typically a fine in an injury the desire to scream and communicate that pain is very very strong that's undoubtedly a social process that's designed to elicit aid from other people and so the to try to stop on that and not get yourself to do that and to try to focus elsewhere the brain wasn't designed to focus elsewhere okay so it's not going to let you quiet that thing down it needs you to know that you're in pain in order to organize your behavior with respect to the damage that's been done and where we're going to go from here to increase your likely to survival so the so but we're going to wind back to to the grudge packing so one of the things that could be useful actually most people don't have any specific problems with grudges they keep grudges where they're appropriate about some jerk that screwed them over some company that screwed them over these are just basic strategies inside of there now there is one time when this is there's times when it's problematic and I will occasionally see an individual who is all you know spending a quiet a lot of mental energy spinning around something that they have been they were taken advantage of they they were they were cheated out of a bunch of money they're really upset about this and the and they may be stewing on this two three four or five years later okay this could happen and one of the things that can be useful here is being alluded to in in the third thing that the third prescription in this magazine which is talking about gratitude people are imperfect etc the the this can be this can be potentially quite useful it's usually not useful in the abstract in other words is usually not usually useful for you to think about for example for think about well there's people starving in Biafra and you know I got I got taken for you know four rods I don't know I had a guy that had a company that's soul old and then his buddies made a couple million dollars and then it turned out some of the stock that they swapped for went bad and they lost bunch money that they thought they had made and you know they're very upset about this as was reasonable but we're stewing on it two three years later and the these were all young intelligent people that had done well and then didn't do as well as they thought they'd done and they were pretty bent out of shape and the part of the you know obviously you could look at the world and say look the whole world is half the world starving to death cash incomes of the average person in the world of three dollars a day you know this is it's the median a kind of income for this for people in the world not the average but the median fifty eight fifty percent of the people make you know less than four or five dollars a day okay this isn't going to help my Silicon Valley guy who thought he was a millionaire and now it turns out he's not after all he's pushing thirty-two now so you know he's pretty frustrated about this now the thing is is that so getting a perspective on your life in the abstract is not that easy but getting a perspective on your life in vivo by actually visiting a hospital ward with a bunch of kids with cancer that can make an impact on people okay so by actually going and observing the fact that huge percentages of the world have it so much harder than you have it and to understand also some other things that are useful to understand in principle so in vivo or real-life exposure in concentrated form people who have had it difficult is a very humbling experience for people and can really shake people out of there in transposition that they have been treated so horribly unfairly at whatever this thing is okay which is usually nothing other than the following the truth of the matter is is that the to this is a perspective that I try to use from a philosophical standpoint and that is that the truth of the matter is nay teacher is immoral nature is unbelievably brutal nature the if you think that what this is what the philosophers call the tragic view of nature and the tragic view of nature is correct so the tragic view of nature is is that all over the earth it's predator-prey relationships all over the place and in order for a predator to survive a prey animal must die okay and this is not happening once in a while this is a daily constant drama that goes on literally throughout living the living world now more more children will buy more more youngsters will will be born than can ever live to adulthood it will be eating they will be damaged they will be dead okay the vast majority of male animals on earth will never mate once in their lifetimes and yet would that was their biological purpose and that is their focus and yet they will never happen okay so there are the world is full of struggle and hardship for animals and it turns out that human beings have skin the cat so they have figured out how to be amazingly cooperative and they are not amoral they actually have moral structures where they actually understand that it's in their best interest to have a mutually cooperative process that goes on where we trade the best that we each can do and we're all better off as a result of this trading process now you can only imagine the fact that that of course since were animals it's going to take place that there's going to be a little bit of viciousness in this process and there's going to be people they're going to try to take advantage of other people of course that's true so you in this lifetime I can guarantee you that you're going to run into circumstances where somebody's going to take advantage of you they may trick you so you're going to get tricked a bunch of times and it's going to turn out you're going to buy a big sack potato chips and you're going to pay $2.99 for big sack and you're going to open it up at home and it's only going to be half full and you're going to be like what the hell okay and so that company is going to want to do that because the other companies are doing it and so everybody's cheating and chiseling a little bit so these processes are inevitable and once in a while you're going to get burned you're going to get burned in love you're going to get burned in friendships you're going to get burned in commerce you're going to get you're going to get burnt and you and at all all that we can reasonably do is say listen at the end of the day if you got burned there may be a lesson for you to be learned in it and there may be features of this situation where you weren't on your guard enough you trusted somebody too much you made yourself too vulnerable or it may be that you acted reasonably but it is one of these situations where there is a conflict of interest between you and another person and you wind up getting burned by somebody who drew the lines differently than you drew that's fair enough we have to have the attitude that the world is as a tragic backdrop and we have a shining potential of human beings to have a very good life despite of that rather than a utopian backdrop about how everybody is supposed to be great and everything is supposed to be fair and everything's supposed to be on the up and up and everybody's supposed to do everything right and then when they don't do it we're all bent out of shape and upset and tearing our hair out and looking for a congressman okay the correct view is to is the first view the correct views the tragic view and if we if we can grasp and understand the tragic view it doesn't mean the life is tragic it means that it has tragic conflicts of interest in it and once we understand this principle we can be truly have more gratitude about how well the circumstances really are for us and for so many people and we can let go of the fact that we got chiseled in a business deal or got chiseled in a situation we were not we didn't make first-team on the varsity when we darn well deserved it because some other kids you know mom flirted with the coach so what okay so what we we are it is not all going to be fair and to be truthful and honest it isn't the life isn't fair life isn't even remotely fair okay once we understand that life isn't even remotely fair we realize that once in a while we're going to get burned and that's part of the price of living and it's just fine and of course a few a few episodes back you were talking about personality differences and how if somebody's disagreeable their fairness line is drawn a little bit further away from fair so they might constantly feel that sizzle constantly having wrecked a perceived need to hold grudges that's correct and you're going to find that that's going to be true so you're you're going to be you're going to find that the it is the angry people I it is the it's the mafiosos that that are going to be and their ilk and their genetic ilk that are going to be you know holding the biggest baddest grudges and that are going to be plotting their revenge and and so on and so forth and so this is part of the price of being dealt those those hand of genetic cards beating your genes is going to involve trying to get smarter than that and doing the kinds of things that I'm talking about being educated enough to understand the philosophical position that I'm talking about is very useful and also by understanding that other people so many other people have had such incredibly bad decks tell to them to to confront those people with your own eyeballs and to see just how hard it is that their existences are should hopefully release from you the energy that is directed at you making sure that you get that seven percent that you had come into you mm-hmm now going on to number four for this letting go of grudges is they say remove yourself from unjust situations and refrain from acting if from interacting with people that are perpetually unfair or unjust assess imaginable tearful very bit sure it sounds very reasonable and so and and this is again being smart enough understand that and being insightful enough I should say not smart enough the insightful enough to understand that there are people may be close to your life that are disagreeable inherently and they they can't help themselves they're they're 80/20 traders they're 70/30 traders and you're going to find that they're irritable they're disagreeing with people they disagree with you they interrupt you etc and so they've got and as a result of that you can count on getting you know a bunch of rough processes and so of course the the smart job in life is to plot your course of life towards the agreeable half of the graph there are 320 million people or so in the United States that means there's a hundred and sixty people that are at the fiftieth percentile or higher for agreeable you know a very smart way to live this life is to move your move your little tentacles towards those people and away from people on the other side of the graph very good you know this article is actually more impressive it sounds like than than some of the other articles we've gone over yeah yes there they're thinking it through to some degree they're there they're seeing some you know kernels of truth in and in this and it's all good except for this one says hold a letting go sense ceremony I knew there piece of bullshit in here somewhere yeah yeah I I've been been a party to these sorts of ceremonies in clinical psychology this is uh I think this came in with the 1960s and Gestalt therapy and some other some other imaginative kind of therapeutic processes and I don't know of any evidence that supports it maybe somebody does but I have been I have watched this process myself I've been in on therapy teams that have directed this kind of ritual and I've never seen it do anything so other than a little bit of showing off at the moment of the original ritual so I wouldn't expect this to be useful and so but good luck well Jeffrey Miller would probably argue this is a mating ceremony rather than a letting go ceremony right yes he undoubtedly would he would be right all right so the other ones are fairly similar to what you've already talked about focus on forgiving the person choose peaceful and productive thoughts and then the last practice be there everyone I want to stop forgiving the other person you know the truth is is that you can't forgive another person electively this is not a voluntary process for your nervous system your your nervous system has feelings and creates actions that are consistent with your best analysis of what the truth is and so you can't tell yourself well I have to forgive you can't it's going to do nothing your nervous system is designed by nature to run an algorithm that says you know what that person cheated me they knew what they were doing I need to hold a grudge and remember that they did that etc they're dangerous and I'm irritated and not only that I want to push their reputation around and possibly alarm them to make them feel guilty and then give me a concession so we're even okay that's how the nervous system is built to try to top down Wolf's in here and say forgive them is ludicrous that's not going to happen okay now what can happen is you can find yourself reducing your the amount of energy and attention towards this issue by doing the other things that I talked about by understanding more deeply the tragic view that we have in life and that they're they're just a they're just a tough little organism that was out to try to steal some of your life's energy and that's what they did and they got away with it okay fair enough in other words we're not forgiving them we're understanding and not acknowledging their motivation and we're understanding and acknowledging but if we play in the national bass Association the referees are not going to get every call right and some nights they're going to call them worse on our team than they call them on the other team and it's going to be unfair but that's part of the price we plant pay for playing in this league and part of the place we play for for playing in the game of human interaction trade and get things from other people is that we're going to get disappointed and we're going to get cheated from time to time that's a different issue than forgiving that individual I don't know that I would forgive an individual for ever cheated me okay I don't think so I'm going to remember it I'm going to feel the grudge I'm going to be holding that grudge the next time I'm interacting with them but but I'm not going to be twisted out of shape about this indefinitely because I will have understood a more global perspective and that's that's how we file down the negative feelings we don't we don't electively get rid of them that makes a lot more sense yes yes okay and then how about choosing peaceful and productive thoughts from what I'm hearing and from what we've talked about this entire show is you can't really choose your thoughts any more than you can choose which emotion you feel if you touch a burning stove know the it's useful to become more knowledgeable about the brain's processes because the the person who understands more about the brains processes actually has more options inside their mind and they can now shift what it is that they may their mind may find a more appropriate priority to optimize their happiness something so there that's why it's useful to be become you know philosophical and facile and and try out you know sort of be open to trying out new different strategies for handling situations like this so one of the things that's useful for example is that sometimes if people are very stressed or upset about anything it turns out a good strategy is to very much change your location like get in the car and drive 100 miles some lake okay it turns out that very often by changing dramatically your physical surroundings it will change your whole minds matrix as you run a cost-benefit analysis over all the issues in your life you we are we don't tend to understand this very directly but you are an animal and the ecological circumstances surrounding your sense8 experience have very large implications for how it is that you are thinking and feeling at any given time and so if you are in a twisted rut one of the best even though that rut still exists when you drive back to Los Angeles from Big Bear Lake you still got the boss there that told you you're being demoted and you're still upset about it about when you went to Big Bear and walked around the lake you actually got to soak in some change and some positive changes in the environment that actually start to help you give perspective over this whole thing in a way that you can't if you're sitting in your apartment so this is uh this is one of the things that you can do to sort of shift your way out of some of these some of these experiences that are unpleasant now if somebody is much much more conscientious than the average person will they also feel like they're getting chiseled more often or will they pay attention to this more often they probably will just because they're pretty fastidious and they're because of their so you could you could have a highly conscientious person that say average and agreeableness and that person could feel pretty upset a lot more often because so often on the other side of transactions people are going to get a little bit sloppy and they're going to try to take a little bit of advantage over a little bit of a slot so let me give you an example so if you're a boss a supervisor that's extremely conscientious you're going to be more upset when people drag in five minutes late to that government job okay it's going to upset it's going to upset you it's going to step to you a lot more than someone who is less conscientious so as a result and you're going to feel that irritation and you're going to feel like you need to talk to your employees and your employees are going to be like what are you talking about I belong to a union you're lucky I'm even here so the point is is that yes you you are pointing out something but it isn't just a disagreeable it's also the highly conscientious that that are going to have more of these little perturbations in the system and of course the people that are more emotionally unstable or if you're a highly conscientious and more emotionally unstable then these then these perturbations are going to be more acute okay instability is neither good nor bad it's really simply about how big the amplitude up and down is on the graph and so the and so as a result if you're highly conscientious god forbid you're highly conscientious and you are disagreeable and you are unstable that that is uh by the way Steve Jobs screaming at everybody in the office that that something was done you know a little tiny mark on the inside of the Apple wasn't in the right place okay that that's what that is and so earlier in the show when you said that if you remember say for example somebody having a purple hat or yeah or somebody have an embassy you want to make sure that anybody with the purple hat you remember is this yet what happens on the free when somebody cuts you off and as you pass them you look to see what kind of person would do that to you oh yeah I mean when you're looking at that you're trying to see you're trying to assess that whole situation and so you're trying to see is this some tough looking lowbrow human being you know it with a tattoo that's dangerous or you know that this was an aggressive act is probably consciously or or do we see that it's a fifty year old lady you know I'm saying with with glasses on and silvering hair yeah you know that that's well-dressed and we look at her and we realized oh my god she's just an idiot didn't know what she was doing so it's it's through these these scans that we are trying to assess the the motivation of the individual and their nature and that that's why that has such a major impact on our subsequent feelings very interesting and the very last one is to practice daily gratitude which is to start looking for the good in your days and stop seeking the bad yeah well I mean this is I think that's maybe a little simplistic it'd be a little simplistic for me but it is a it's a simplistic version of what it is that I was talking about and that is that the to to understand that that that the the world has been and always has been a fierce place for life to attempt to struggle to survive and that it wasn't designed for us to enjoy it it was designed with little enjoying moments in this thing in order for us to do things that would be conducive to the reproduction of the jins it's going to turn out the human beings through their extraordinary ingenuity have been able to master enough of the factors of survival that we can now actually focus on enjoyment of our existence the that that's that's fancy and that's pretty special and we're very lucky and there's some other animals that are lucky to like our domesticated animals to live with us okay they too are in a very similar situation to us and they've got a nice protected existence from the from the tragic view of existence and as a result our job is to I mean a good starting place is to understand how fortunate we are and whatever our struggles are and what our handicaps are we we begin the journey from a very in generally a very good position relative to what we might have expected and from that you know let's complain less and and enjoyment and focus on you know how you know process is better positive all right well let's turn the compass a little bit and start and go over to sports sports is kind of one of the one of the common places where I hear people talking about grudges quite quite loudly in a fun way yeah why is it that we play sports yeah sports are are an example of what we're going to call a fitness indicator and so the fitness indicators are our devices that are that are used to signal gene quality probably the best the best way to think about gene quality is simply what we're going to call mutation loads so let me talk about various Fitness indicators so a fitness indicator would be how well some of them can talk some of them with a lot of mutations in their head in their neural circuits and they got a bunch of lousy mediocre neural circuits full of mistakes can't talk very well okay the also how well you could write that would that that wouldn't be a direct Fitness indicator but it's a natural extension of your ability to speak the let's talk about another Fitness indicator how beautiful you are so that's a way of counting mutations to see you know just how good the gene quality is about individual the and so we start to see Fitness indicators anything that that is difficult to do that that that people are making a display of this in a competitive fashion is a way to say that whoever does it best has less mutations so if you watch the Olympics recently you see the what the world has done is they've actually gone after all kinds of little problems and they have made those problems into competitive hierarchies with a way of judging the performance to try to indicate whether that performance have fewer or greater errors in it so when you really look at all sports this is the analysis of the errors of movement okay and so can the brain orchestrate movement in a way that is act as possible so in principle if you are an extraordinary machine the game of basketball would be a joke because all you do is you'd throw the ball in to to an individual and they turn and they throw it up 80 feet and they'd go in the basket okay that is in principle possible in other words the the human being is a human being strong enough to throw the ball there could be in principle accurate enough to throw it in the hoop but it turns out that you can't because the nervous system is not so beautifully orchestrated that anybody can do it so what we can do is we can we can find out who can do it better we're going to make the contest out of it so these are just like beauty is an indicator of quote how fit well by Fitness indicator I don't mean how fit you are athletically I mean how fit you are in the game of survival of the fittest and in this case what's an important issue here is do you have the best genes in order to reproduce with so what sports are is they are a display of a genetic hierarchy who has the best genes is really the question that is being answered by sport and and that's why we're going to find that in specifically male sports heroes will be highly sought after his mates and so why do people engage in grudges and rivalries with sports it seems like it's a is it just two villages you know fighting against each other yes yes I actually think that that's exactly what it is in other words you're sort of a Stone Age brain that understands that there are groups of people we have in us the national capacity to divide the world of a group of people into what we're going to call the in-group and the out-group and this this tendency to actually divide people up into groups was I mean certainly it's been commented upon for centuries but it was formally first understood as a as a principle by by a psychologist social psychologist by the name of Henry toefl in England in about 1970 or so and what toefl did was he for anybody's interested ta JFD li I believe so what TOEFL did was he created experiments on what he called minimal groups and so let me give you an example of a minimal group and we can see what happens so we could Det we could walk into a room and say things like ok you guys on this side of the room you're the Blues and you guys on the other side of the Greens ok so we haven't actually had any objective thing about about these people that the Blues are good at something or we believe blues you know came from the west side of town nothing a bunch of random people in a room and we just say blues on the lap the greens on the right now we have them engage in various and sundry tasks you know verbal learning cows or poetry or you know you know drawing pictures on the board whatever it's going to turn out that if you have the green people analyzed everybody you've got to take a green person in the room and you have them rate everybody in the room on how they're doing they read the green people better than the blue people if you have a blue person in the room they read the blue people better than the green people so it's going to turn out that the minimum amount of information necessary to delineate two groups creates an in-group out-group effect in human beings you can literally do it and hit them unconsciously walk into a room and say ok I'm thinking about dividing the group right here these people on you guys on that side the other on the other side and then don't say anything else and then an hour later you do a process like this and you would get a minimal group effect that the people that happen to be on the Left will rate people that are over there talking to them as higher than the people on the right so this tendency obviously is deep in human natural history to favor our group against your group so what sports are is they delineate groups different colored Jersey different name of the mascot different town we come from different schools cetera it's very clear us against ok and us against them in human natural hist three could in principle be dangerous and so as a result it can get pretty ferocious and people get all upset about it and it's going to turn out that if you watch the testosterone levels of males that are watching NFL games you will find that after their team wins the males that are watching from their home TV have their testosterone levels rise and the men's who have watched their team lose will have their testosterone levels drop okay this is likely to mean that the victory at warfare in village warfare probably related to at least one thing maybe raping and pillaging but certainly also related to more likely sexual activity for the victor one way or the other maybe with their own mates so this the process of victory in these and these in these things that clearly has a heavy evolutionary footprint and that's why we can get in group out group and you potentially grudges rivalries all that sort of thing it's remember it's going to be very likely human beings are not going to be honest in terms of their ability to analyze whether a game was played fairly it's going to be part of human nature is going to be set to be somewhat a bit personally biased so I call it fifty five forty five I believe that the human being the average human beings chip fairness chip is set about ten percent in their own direction so it's not 50/50 we're going to add ten percent to our 50 and we're going to wind up at fifty five so this is why the average sports fan feels like particularly any time their team loses they feel like the referees have cheated them okay so I've never heard in my life I've never heard a sports fan say that his team won because the ref seemed to give his team the game I have never heard this I had one friend who was like that and he he was a referee and he taught he taught me how to be a referee also I refereed hockey now and he would always have super of course he was the very very very conscientious guy and he would oftentimes say yep they gave us the game there so we used to say are you crazy Phil really you're going to go inside that don't spoil our thunder raft very interesting so you had a pet actually an expert a subject matter expert and the very nature of that expert that he was very high conscientious and so yeah that's you've now given me an experience that I never thought I would ever have I never thought that there was such an individual but it turns out there was one so you're going to see behind this these biases you can see how this is going to be ripe for rivalries so you're going to see that if the Raiders beat the 49ers the 49er fans are going to feel like they got cheated at which point they're going to feel like that that they we have to get them next time because they cheated us the referees cheated us or that team cheated us you know things were done unfairly and we and our genes don't look as good our genes are better than their genes and yet their genes displayed as better than our genes so that in effect they're going to be able to charm and take our women and this is not fair okay and so they can actually be anger disappointment all kinds of emotions and then a determination to win the next game to assert and display our true and rightful superiority that that is in the system and that that's what that's what makes the NFL the NFL
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