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Jayne: The thrill of victory isn’t as potent as the agony of defeat

By Greg Jayne, Columbian Opinion Page Editor
Published: July 22, 2018, 6:02am

In case you were wondering, this did not come from the Captain Obvious School of Researching the Obvious. But it could have.

Instead, it came from a pair of British researchers at the University of Sussex. And while the results are interesting, they also are, um, obvious. At least to those of us who spend way too much time watching sports.

You see, according to Peter Dolton and George MacKerron, sports make us unhappy. Using 3 million responses to a happiness-monitoring app, they correlated the happiness of respondents to the results of those respondents’ favorite soccer teams. Yes, soccer. They are British, after all.

The researchers found that the pleasure fans derive from a victory by their team is outweighed — by a factor of two — by the sadness of a loss. We’re guessing that applies to American football and basketball and baseball fans, as well. You know, because in some households in northeast Vancouver — we’re not naming names — it is still forbidden to talk about that time the team threw an interception from the 1-yard line in the Super Bowl.

Too soon? Sorry. We won’t mention it.

Dolton and MacKerron analyzed data from an app that pinged 32,000 people several times a day and asked how happy they were feeling on a 100-point scale. It also asked what they were doing and who they were with.

The results showed that in the hour immediately after a victory by their favorite team, respondents were an average of 3.9 points happier than usual; but after a loss they typically were 7.8 points less happy than normal. In addition, it found that the agony of defeat lingers longer than the thrill of victory.

It is not clear whether a response below zero was allowed in the event of, say, an ill-fated pass in the final minute of a big game. A score of minus 2 zillion probably would skew the results.

But we won’t mention that.

All of this has some interesting sociological implications. Because unless you are a front-running fan of some despicable, contemptible, loathsome Evil Empire of a sports franchise — oh, I don’t know, like maybe the New England Patriots — your team is likely to lose as often as it wins over time. And with losses feeling worse than victories feel good, that means that sports make us miserable.

Which begs the question of why we become emotionally invested in our favorite teams. Aside from the possibility that we simply enjoy reveling in misery, the answers really are not that difficult to decipher.

A social connection

For one, there is the excitement and the entertainment of the games themselves. There is a sense of awe that comes from watching athletes demonstrate the peak of human physical performance. Unless it’s Tom Brady. He’s not human; he’s a cyborg created in a lab. Hey, did we mention that losses tend to linger?

There also is a sense of hope and anticipation, an unshakable faith that might or might not be rooted in reality. “Fans systematically overestimate the probability of their team winning and never revise and learn from experience,” Dolton and MacKerron wrote. “Many football fans (we think they mean soccer) may continue to go to matches — always in hope and expectation that this particular match will go their way.”

All of that might play a role, yet it does not get to the heart of the matter. Because the real reason we like sports and the real reason we cling to a particular team is the sense of camaraderie and shared experience. It is communal and it is generational, providing connections that often are difficult to find in an increasingly disconnected society.

A few years ago, my son, who is now 15, got hooked on the Seahawks. We have watched darn near every game together over the past five years, bonding over a shared interest. That, more than anything, explains why people become sports fans and stick with it even when it makes them miserable — and it is not something that can be measured by an app.

Even when the unmentionable happens.

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