Rooting for the Favorite Is a Sign of Social Dominance - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/rooting-for-the-favorite-is-a-sign-of-social-dominance
Over the first week of the Rio Olympics, an ancient narrative played out in the men’s rugby sevens tournament. Rising through a field of 12, the Fiji national team dispatched powerhouses New Zealand and Great Britain on its way to a gold medal, the first of any kind for the small South Pacific nation. Having defeated its former colonial ruler in the final match, an unexpected champion was crowned and this made a lot of people happy; in the Olympics, at least, people tend to cheer for an underdog. While it’s hard to imagine that everybody wasn’t thrilled by Fiji’s win, a recent article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests otherwise. The article’s authors, Serena Does from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Avital Mentovich from the University of Essex, found (...)