The eCrozier

Psychologist Mina Cikara at Harvard recruited baseball fans of the Red Sox and Yankees for an experiment. She had them watch videos of both teams while they were lying in an activated MRI scanner. Her results showed that fans of each team experienced pleasure when their team did well, which isn’t surprising. But the results also showed they experienced just as much pleasure when their rival team did poorly. The part of the brain called the ventral striatum lit up equally in both scenarios. In explaining these results, Dr. Cikara said: “You (the baseball fan) haven’t benefited materially in any way. You only feel pleasure because it feels good to watch your rival fail.” Oh my! What about SEC football, could it possibly apply there as well? All I can say is: “Go Dawgs!”

Dr. Cikara’s research didn’t end there. Two weeks later she sent the study participants a survey inquiring how likely it’d be that they’d engage in different aggressive behaviors. She described the results from that survey this way: “And the thing that we found that was really exciting for us as academics, but probably bad for the world, was that those people who exhibited that much more ventral striatal activity when watching their rival fail two weeks earlier in the scanner were the same people who then told us they would be that much more likely to threaten, heckle and hit a rival fan.” Uh oh!

But still, that’s only about sport’s rivalries. It’s all just good fun, right? Only a little schadenfreude being exercised. Well, in turns out, the same behavior patterns are exhibited beyond sports. Once a rival is identified in any context and the ventral striatal is activated, threatening and violent behavior often results. We’ve seen when at political rallies journalists are branded “the enemy of the people,” they become targets for violence. Many now have to have a full-time security detail. We witnessed that in Charlottesville a year ago when a white-supremacist, his ventral striatal raging from the hateful words spewed out, drove his car into the enemy (actually his fellow citizens) crowd. And a few years ago in Israel and Gaza, as rockets were fired in both directions, I saw video of people sitting in their homes watching it on TV. Both Israelis and Gazans were cheering the death and destruction inflicted on the other side. War as spectator sport, so it goes.

For us to address this personally, we must first name it as a reality, not only for other people, but for ourselves. It’s fine when it’s light-hearted as in when the Stupid Cubs lose to my Reds (“stupid” isn’t really in their official name, which I imagine you knew already), but beyond such fun it can become deadly. How are we participating in, or maybe just condoning, such behavior in ourselves or in others? Like in AA, the first step is to acknowledge we have a problem and then turn it over to a ‘higher power.” We can’t expect to help others change their behavior until we address it in ourselves. So, how are our words and actions directed at people with whom we disagree (maybe significantly) leading us to behavior that might turn violent in ourselves or in others? This isn’t just a practical concern for our common life. It’s also about our soul-wellness as we address it in our daily prayers. We should ask God to calm our ventral striatal. If you can’t remember that neuro-science term, then that’s OK. God knows exactly where it is.