Social Psychology | Man Bites Dog

Theories of social psychology tell us that in groups – such as sport teams – members of minority communities assume salience by virtue of their looks, language, or identifiers in their names. In cases of defeat they are prone to be saddled with burden of blame because their salience makes them seem more causal, more responsible.

Atikh Rashid

Following India’s defeat to Pakistan in the Super 4 match of Asia Cup on Saturday, Indian pacer Arshdeep Singh became the target of social media trolling for dropping a seemingly easy catch of Asif Ali at short third man in the 18^th over. Trolls attacked the 23-year-old bowler with political slurs and insinuated that he dropped the catch deliberately, out of his disloyalty to the Indian nation.

Last October, in another high stake India-Pakistan match in T20 international World Cup, Mohammad Shami’s poor bowling performance led to social media trolls questioning his loyalty to the country. For an expensive over in the last lap that hastened Indian teams debacle, Shami’s identity as an Indian was questioned and slurs linking his religion with the rival team were liberally used.

We are living in times of free floating social media hatred that attaches to individuals at the slightest provocations. Targeted trolling is may also not be spontaneous and could often be part of ‘social media cold wars’ among competing political groups. Still, they do cause hurt to the individual or group at the receiving end.

Any reasonable cricket fan will tell you that it’s excessive and irrational to blame a single act by one player for a team’s defeat and then use that to put his ability and attitude in the dock. But a human mind doesn’t use reason all the time. Many a times, instincts kick in which cloud the appeals to reason.

Mohammad Shami’s poor bowling performance in high stake India-Pakistan match in T20 international World Cup led to social media trolls questioning his loyalty to the country.

Human mind, psychologists tell us, wants to attribute significant incidents – victories, defeats, and such – to causes. The mind starts making inferences about the causes and stops the search when a sufficient cause is found. ‘The Attribution Theory’ is one of the best known theories in social psychology that deals with how people interpret behavior and attribute causations for their own or other people’s behavior. It was first proposed by Fritz Heider in 1958 in his book ‘The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations.

The mind makes a ‘dispositional attribution’ when it explains a person’s action by pointing to something about the person. On the other hand, it makes a ‘situational attribution’ when the behavior or action is said to have been influenced by external factors or by the situation. Observers often tend to make what psychologists call ‘The Fundamental Attribution Error’ in which they overestimate the dispositional influences (‘the catch was dropped because the player is bad at the game, or he is disloyal to the team’) and underestimating the situational influences (the ball slipped off because of the dew, the light glare, or pressure of the game).

While observers are prone to making dispositional attribution, the individual involved in the in the action with negative result often makes situational attribution – blaming factors external to him or her.

The salience of the minority members

The human mind makes sense of the world with the aid of categories. In social life, the social categories help the mind make easy and fast judgements. By definition, minority groups are ‘uncommon’ and the human cognitive system is tuned to spotting their presence.

Individuals from minority groups are salient in perception, memory, and visual awareness, hence performance of players like Arshdeep Singh or Mohammad Shami comes under greater scrutiny, especially during high stake games.

Increasing social discord and thickening of community lines – something that India has been seeing a lot lately – makes people more aware and observant about the behavior of people perceived as others.

Research by Taylor and Fiske (1978) shows that women are seen as more causal when they is only one woman in the group.

Research done by Shelly Taylor and Susan Fiske shows that in a group setting a member of a minority community is seen as more influential and causal when there’s only one minority member in the group, thus making the presence salient. When there is only one woman in a group, she is seen as disproportionately responsible for the group decisions. This impression declines as more women are added to the group.

In their 1978 study ‘Salience, Attention, and Attribution: The Top of the Head Phenomenon’, Taylor and Fiske discuss the ‘Salience Hypothesis’ which states that the more salient an actor seems, the more an observer will ascribe a causality to him or her while making a snap judgment.

When things turn out well (a match is won, an enemy is crushed) the effects of salience turn out to be good. In times of adversity (a team is defeated by an arch rival, a pandemic threatens the wellbeing of the world and shuts economic activity), then people who are salient because they look different or sound different are at the risk of becoming scapegoated, being blamed as their salience makes them seem more responsible.

Further Readings:

1) Salience, Attention, and Attribution: Top of the Head Phenomena (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S006526010860009X)

2) Minority salience and the overestimation of individuals from minority groups in perception and memory (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116884119#:~:text=In%20many%20contexts%2C%20minorities%20tend,creating%20an%20illusion%20of%20diversity)

3) The process of causal attribution (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1973-24800-001)

4) Salience https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/psychology/salience

5) Attribution Theories (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Or-jq3G1g8

In a 1995 research paper, psychologists studying ‘counterfactual thinking’ analysed video footage of the 1992 Barcelona Games to deduce that the knowledge of ‘almost winning a Gold medal’ ruined the moment for a silver medallist, while the bronze winner was contented by the thought: ‘I at least won a medal’.

Richard Carapaz of Ecuador, centre, who won the gold medal, fist pumps bronze medal winner Tadej Pogacar of Slovenia, as silver medal winner Wout van Aert of Belgium watches, after the men’s cycling road race at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 24, 2021, in Oyama, Japan. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

ATIKH RASHID

During a newspaper interview he gave almost 70 years after he clinched a silver medal at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, mid-distance American runner Abel Kiviat described the race as a “nightmare”.

His silver medal had come after a photo-finish — a first in Olympic history — in which he had just got past fellow American Norman Taber in the 1500m race.

“That race was the biggest disappointment of my life. I never saw Jackson,” he said while referring to Great Britain’s Arnold Jackson who had secured by the slimmest margin of 0.1 seconds. “I wake up sometimes and say, ‘What the heck happened to me?” Kiviat said.

The final moment of 1500 m race in 1912 Games in which Great Britain’s Arnold Jackson beat USA’s Abel Kiviat (third from left) by 0.1 seconds.

Kiviat, who died in 1991, showed that the disappointment of losing out narrowly lingers, but he was no exception in this regard. Most silver medallists end up tormenting themselves by imagining the alternative possibility if they had pushed a little harder.

Ravi Kumar Dahiya, the Indian wrestler who secured a silver medal for India in 57 kg freestyle on Thursday in the ongoing Tokyo Olympics, voiced a similar disappointment.

“What’s the point of this?… I had come here with only one target, a gold medal. This (silver medal) is okay, but it’s not gold,” he told reporters.

A 1995 research paper published by psychologists Victoria Medvec, Thomas Gilovich (both from Cornell), and Scott F Madey (University of Toledo) has an answer to why silver medallists may be feeling the way they are.

They studied this phenomenon to conclude that on a happiness scale, silver medallists fair poorly owing to the human tendency to indulge in ‘counterfactual thinking’ — the propensity to think of alternative circumstances to real-life events, especially those with far-ranging consequences.

The study, “When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction Among Olympic Medallists”, deduced that bronze medallists score much better on the happiness scale when compared to silver medallists who had outperformed them in the game.

Mean Happiness Ratings: Bronze medalists fared better on the happiness scale immediately after the event as well as at the medal stand compared to the silver medalists (Medevec et al, 1995)

Medvec and colleagues analysed visible expressions of the bronze and silver medal-winning athletes at the 1992 Summer Olympics immediately after the finish of the event when the winners stood at the medal stand.

The study aimed to determine how counterfactual thinking and the psychology of “coming close” affects the feeling of satisfaction and the degree of well-being. Medvec et al chose the domain of athletic competition outcomes to study the subject because it throws up results with an unusual precision with competitors finishing first, second, or third with a fractional difference and earning distinctly different rewards of gold, silver, and bronze medals.

“We were interested in whether the effects of different counterfactual comparisons are sufficiently strong to cause people who are objectively worse off to sometimes feel better than those in a superior state. Moreover, we were interested not just in documenting isolated episodes in which this might happen, but in identifying a specific situation in which it occurs with regularity and predictability. The domain we chose to investigate was athletic competition,” said Medvec and his colleagues in the paper published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Also Read |Tokyo 2020: When pocketing the silver medal was not the right thing to do

As part of the study, the researchers collated the video footage from the Barcelona Olympic Games held three years ago and edited them in three different master tapes. One showed the medallists’ reaction immediately after the results were announced, another showed them receiving the medals at the stand, and a third one comprised of the interviews they gave to media persons about their performance.

In the first study, the university students, who were blind to the results, were asked to judge the immediate reaction of 41 athletes on a 10-point ‘agony to ecstasy’ scale. After assessing athletes’ reactions, silver medallists received a mean rating of 4.8 while bronze medallists received a mean rating of 7.1 on the happiness scale. When examining the athletes’ reaction on the medal stand, participants assigned the bronze medallists a mean rating of 5.7 and a 4.3 for silver medallists.

In the second part of the same study, the participants reviewed television interviews of 22 silver and bronze medallists to see what was the predominant feeling expressed by each athlete: Was he/she happy with what was achieved, or was he/she preoccupied with a feeling of regret. The participants judged the expressed feelings on a 10-point scale which had “At least I…” on one end and “I almost…” on the other.

It was found that the silver medallists focused more on “I almost” than bronze medallists who expressed a feeling of achievement and satisfaction for getting a medal. Participants assigned silver medallists’ thoughts an average rating of 5.7 and bronze medallists’ an average rating of only 4.4 on the 10-point “At least I… ” to “I almost…” scale.

Explaining the findings, the researchers wrote, “To the silver medallist, the most vivid counterfactual thoughts are often focused on nearly winning the gold. Second place is only one step away from the cherished gold medal and all of its attendant social and financial rewards. Thus, whatever joy the silver medallist may feel is often tempered by tortuous thoughts of what might have been had she only lengthened her stride, adjusted her breathing, pointed her toes, and so on. For the bronze medallist, in contrast, the most compelling counterfactual alternative is often coming in fourth place and being in the showers instead of on the medal stand.”

Social psychologists have long held that an individual’s wellbeing in any given circumstance depends on how these circumstances compare with those with whom he tends to compare them.

Such counterfactual thinking also has a functional value as those who ruin their happiness by thinking about the missed opportunity often strive to improve their future performances.

“Downward comparisons (i.e., thinking about a worse outcome) are thought to provide comfort, whereas upward comparisons (i.e., thinking about a better outcome) are thought to improve future performance. Indeed, it has been shown that people who expect to perform again in the future are more likely to generate upward counterfactuals than those who expect to move on,” said the study.

(This article appeared on the indianexpress.com as Why a bronze medal winner often looks happier than a silver medallist at the Olympics on August 13, 2021)