Go Blue Team!

Yesterday Lindsey and I did our global duty and watched the world cup (loved it!). It was an epic finish, yada yada, but something interesting happened. Lindsey and I don't know anything about soccer, or the teams playing. We decided ahead of time that we were both going to be rooting for the Netherlands...because the Netherlands were underdogs. And we like underdogs. Also, Amsterdam.

So for the first half we cheered the Netherlands on, irritated that Spain was playing so rudely. At half time, the guy sitting next to me remarked "I came here wanting the Netherlands to win, but Spain is playing so much cleaner of a game. I think I want Spain to win now." (sounds like he was as much of an Only-If-It's-The-World-Cup soccer fan as we were) "But..." I asked him, "didn't that one Spanish player kick that guy in the chest" (in one of the more difficult to watch moments. See above video). "No, that was the Netherlands..."

For a moment I was about to protest...I was sure that the guy who had kicked the other guy in the chest had been wearing an Orange jersey, the color Spain was wearing. But I was so out of my element that I wasn't about to contradict anyone. But I was troubled by this rupture...I looked up in the corner of the screen and saw that the Netherlands had an orange stripe next to their name, and Spain had a blue strip. We had been cheering for Spain the whole time.

So that was silly of us. Just a little mistake that had gone on comically long. It would have been far more easily corrected if there was any scoring (since we would have seen Netherlands points going up when the orange team scored) but the game was 0-0 all the way to the last five minutes of overtime. It also would have been an easy fix if we'd been watching in a quiet environment, where we could hear the announcer. But we had gone to a big old movie theatre where the mumbling crowd was a constant white noise. But what's most interesting is what happened next: Both Lindsey and I felt strongly compelled to continue cheering for Spain.

So here is a situation where the stakes are very very low. Neither of us cared who won. But it's a situation where it's best to manufacture high stakes. This is a common phenomenon, right? Some things are more fun when you set reality aside and pretend that it's a big effin' deal. But when one is manufacturing high stakes, what determines the direction in which one chooses to manufacture them? Well surely one of the most salient factors is the investments of people around you. If everyone around you is cheering for the Yankees, you're a Yankees fan for the day, even if you don't know how many innings are in a baseball game. But the crowd seemed pretty evenly split at this event.

So we had two factors influencing us: An explicit choice to cheer for the Netherlands, and a determinate history of cheering for Spain. When we had to decide which of those were going to have a decisive influence on our actions, we went with a sort of conative inertia. We were inclined to maintain a particular object of our enthusiasms (the blue team) rather than switch to a different object (the orange team). This, apparently, was far stronger than our cognitive inertia, which might have inclined us to continue thinking the same thought (i.e. that we desired the Netherlands to win).

I don't know that this means anything, and perhaps its a perfectly expected result. But it struck me as interesting, and possibly revealing, even if I don't know what it reveals. I do wonder if similar phenomenon could be experimentally isolated and tested.