Are you aware that reliably rooting for the underdog is not a human universal? eg modern Japanese and Americans pick underdogs in sports ~70% of the time while Chinese and Israelis are close to 50/50
I always thought "rooting for the underdog" stemmed from the hedonic treadmill and self-concept / identification - everyone always sees themselves as the underdog, because whatever level of relative success they are, they're always paying more attention to higher-ups (and social media puts attractive millionaires living fabulous lives in front of people for several hours per day to boot).
And because they see themselves as the underdog, they root for them. But apparently this is much more culturally mediated than I thought, thanks for sharing.
If we interpret “the underdog” as “the lower probability event” then we may bet on the underdog because of asymmetric information, asymmetric outcome, or even (if you believe in black swan events) different approaches to risk computation and probability estimation.
People playing the lottery are betting on the David of them winning.
Betting on Davids is more fun because KL divergence is big and we love surprises: :)
Are you aware that reliably rooting for the underdog is not a human universal? eg modern Japanese and Americans pick underdogs in sports ~70% of the time while Chinese and Israelis are close to 50/50
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6254058/
Really interesting!
I always thought "rooting for the underdog" stemmed from the hedonic treadmill and self-concept / identification - everyone always sees themselves as the underdog, because whatever level of relative success they are, they're always paying more attention to higher-ups (and social media puts attractive millionaires living fabulous lives in front of people for several hours per day to boot).
And because they see themselves as the underdog, they root for them. But apparently this is much more culturally mediated than I thought, thanks for sharing.
If we interpret “the underdog” as “the lower probability event” then we may bet on the underdog because of asymmetric information, asymmetric outcome, or even (if you believe in black swan events) different approaches to risk computation and probability estimation.
People playing the lottery are betting on the David of them winning.
Betting on Davids is more fun because KL divergence is big and we love surprises: :)
There is that. Part of this is just me being the stogey "nothing ever happens" guy.