It doesn’t happen very often, but even the USC Trojans sometimes lose. This time, it happened at home in the LA Coliseum. Mr. F. and I were actually watching the game at home on TV, having passed our tickets for the Stanford game on to family members. I’m rather glad I didn’t see this one in person.
Few experiences compare with the emotional ups and downs of athletics. We love winning and we hate losing. As psychologists, we should be asking ourselves “why?” We try to tell our children that it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, but how you play the game, but in the back of our heads is this little voice saying, “LIAR!” It’s rather refreshing when people involved with sports are actually up front when it comes to the importance of winning. Mike Garrett (known around USC as simply “G”) says that “it’s all about winning.” He’s right.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that there are some real biological and historical reasons for these emotions. Losing, or even watching your favorite team lose, temporarily reduces a man’s testosterone levels [1]. Ouch. The effect is even worse when you watch your team lose on its home field, as Trojan fans can now attest [2].
We might ask what else correlates with testosterone levels? Well, sexual behavior does, at least in most animals (in humans, the quality of a person’s relationship is more important). So lowering the testosterone of losers is one of Mom Nature’s mean ways to ensure that “only the strongest survive,” or in this case, reproduce, at least in crayfish.
Human responses to losing probably hark back to our hunter-gatherer days, assuming that sports such as football provide a modern metaphor for combat. Losing a battle, or watching your side lose, certainly had some nasty repercussions, like death or enslavement for you, too. Perhaps this experience is painful in order to provide us more motivation to win. It’s easy to speculate that losing on one’s home turf would be more disastrous, too. If your side lost a battle far away, at least those of you at home would get a second chance.
So…we can reflect on our weekend and its ups and downs for our family’s favorite teams. Trojans, Gators, and Bruins down (oh, to Notre Dame of all teams, too! Insulting!) Vols and Black Knights of Army (woo hoo) up. And special congrats to Ron Zook of Illinois for his big win over Wisconsin. Karen knew Coach Zook at Florida, and considered him a real “player’s coach” and a genuinely nice person.
1. Booth, A., Shelley, G., Mazur, A. Tharp, G., & Kittock, R. (1989). Testosterone, and winning and losing in human competition. Hormones and Behavior, 23, 556-571.
2. Neave, N., & Wolfson, S. (2003). Testosterone, territoriality, and the ‘home advantage.’ Physiology and Behavior, 78, 269-275.
3 Comments
TNguyen · October 7, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I learned in Social Psych that high testosterone correlated with dominance and people with it were more receptive to angry faces. That scares me a little that people with high testosterone could be violent because they find that aggressiveness is stimulating. The thought of reducing testoserone soothes me. I know not all men or women have high testosterone to begin with but it’s better to know that people who have high testosterone could reduce it to become less agressive/dominating.
nichol.myers · October 9, 2007 at 11:43 am
I couldn’t agree more with Garrett. Ever since I was a child, I learned about the Psychology of parenting by observing my own. My mom always TOLD me that I needed to be a good sport (apparently I had inherited the competitive gene from my dad) whilst my father would SHOW me how to win (i.e. “keep your eye on the ball”). I can’t imagine that anything in life is worth doing unless it’s worth doing well. And, in order to do that, you have to try to win.
It is the basic psychological principle of positive reinforcement. We try to win, because of all the accolades we receive when we do so — the trophies, the pats on the back, the cash money, the “atta girls (or boys, for the guys).” Thus, the rewards for winning reinforce our behavior to such an extent that we try to continue the same behavior over and over again to receive the reward.
Unfortunately, one cannot control all the factors involved with any given scenario (such as the weather, competitors, or controlling exactly what one ate that day and how many milliliters of water one consumed). So you get our Marion Joneses of our generation, trying to up their edge by injecting chemicals to make them have the edge biologically. Why would one go to such lengths? It MUST be all about winning…
c.busso · October 15, 2007 at 10:27 pm
This entry hits home for me. My family are avid USC fans and they have brain washed me along with them. Reading about testosterone after you favorite team losing reminds me of my dad and how he has always reacted to sports, even when he coached my soccer teams as a kid. Noticing the effects of the loss on my mom is more interesting to me. I can see the differences in how it effects both my parents. It’s interesing to see how people react even if you aren’t playing.
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