Think Again

HYPOTHESIS 3: BEASTS OF HABIT
My all-time favorite commercial starts with a close-up of a man and a
woman kissing. As the camera zooms out, you see that he’s wearing an
Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt and she’s wearing a Michigan Wolverines
T-shirt. The caption: “Without sports, this wouldn’t be disgusting.”

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As a lifelong Wolverine fan, I was raised to boo at Buckeye fans. My
uncle filled his basement with Michigan paraphernalia, got up at 3:00 a.m.
on Saturdays to start setting up for tailgates, and drove a van with the
Michigan logo emblazoned on the side. When I went back home to
Michigan for grad school and one of my college roommates started medical
school at Ohio State, it was only natural for me to preach my school’s
superiority by phone and prosecute his intelligence by text.
A few years ago, I got to know an unusually kind woman in her
seventies who works with Holocaust survivors. Last summer, when she
mentioned that she had gone to Ohio State, my first response was “yuck.”
My next reaction was to be disgusted with myself. Who cares where she
went to school half a century ago? How did I get programmed this way?
Suddenly it seemed odd that anyone would hate a team at all.
In ancient Greece, Plutarch wrote of a wooden ship that Theseus sailed
from Crete to Athens. To preserve the ship, as its old planks decayed,
Athenians would replace them with new wood. Eventually all the planks
had been replaced. It looked like the same ship, but none of its parts was the
same. Was it still the same ship? Later, philosophers added a wrinkle: if you
collected all the original planks and fashioned them into a ship, would that
be the same ship?
The ship of Theseus has a lot in common with a sports franchise. If you
hail from Boston, you might hate the 1920 Yankees for taking Babe Ruth or
the 1978 Yankees for dashing your World Series hopes. Although the
current team carries the same name, the pieces are different. The players are
long gone. So are the managers and coaches. The stadium has been
replaced. “You’re actually rooting for the clothes,” Jerry Seinfeld quipped.
“Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to a different team,
they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt; they hate
him now. Boo! Different shirt! Boo!”
I think it’s a ritual. A fun but arbitrary ritual—a ceremony that we
perform out of habit. We imprinted on it when we were young and
impressionable, or were new to a city and looking for esprit de corps. Sure,
there are moments where team loyalty does matter in our lives: it allows us
to high-five acquaintances at bars and hug strangers at victory parades. It
gives us a sense of solidarity. If you reflect on it, though, hating an
opposing team is an accident of birth. If you had been born in New York
instead of Boston, would you really hate the Yankees?

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For our third approach, Tim and I recruited fans of the Red Sox and
Yankees. To prove their allegiance, they had to correctly name one of their
team’s players from a photo—and the last year his team had won the World
Series. Then we took some steps to open their minds. First, to help them
recognize the complexity of their own beliefs, we asked them to list three
positives and three negatives about fans of the opposing team. You saw the
most common negatives earlier, but they were able to come up with some
positives, too: