BirdsCommaAngry
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- Jan 13, 2013
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Between Testeverde's phantom touchdown, Super Bowl XL, and our overall dislike of questionable and blatantly erroneous calls, we've had a very eventful relationship with the zebras. Currently, this relationship has been coming to a head as we watch our team continue week after week as the most penalized while having the fewest number of penalties being called against our opponents. It's aggravating. It's frustrating. It's distressing to the point where we even ruminate and discuss this issue without thought as to what we can do to provide a solution. Even when we do discuss solutions, like adding oversight through increasing the role of replay, relying more on booth reviewers, employing full-time referees, etc, they're passive solutions. These are solutions that are proposed without the knowledge of how we affect the referee decisions and put that responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the institution providing us with our favorite sport.
What I'm about to tell you is that while the errors of referees can be a product of corruption, inexperience, incompetence, lacking oversight, and everything else we allude to about them, they're also a product of what the fans in the stadium choose to do on game-day. With knowing what that influence is and how it works, we can help chip away at that very disparity in penalties that is hampering us today.
The basis of our influence over the referees is centered around two key quirks in human nature: Actor-observer bias and the biology behind how we determine whether something is accurate or not. Actor-observer bias, which is the tendency for people to attribute their own decisions to situational factors while attributing the decisions of others to their personality. In other words, if I trip over someone's foot on the way to my seat, I'm more likely to feel it's because I was distracted by something happening on the field or in the stands. If I'm witness to someone else tripping, I'm more likely to think they're just clumsy. When it comes to critiquing referees, we make the same oversimplification and judge them by our perception of their personalities and not by what's influencing them. This is the basis for why we haven't figured out or made ourselves aware of what fans can do to help referees assist their team. We looked only at them and not their biggest situational factor during the game: the home-team's fans.
To understand how we're such a factor, we need to understand the second quirk in human nature I mentioned regarding how we go about determining whether someone is deceiving us or not. The overall process is simple: one part of our brain will assume whatever it is presented with is true automatically and it will only be found false after higher-functions of our mind dig deeper and determine it is false. It's like our legal system stating we're innocent until proven guilty, only that our brain's governing function is to assume truth until proven false. This is why kids can trick one another by asking "Hey, did you know the word gullible isn't in the dictionary?" and generally getting a response made up of one version "Really?" or another before they realize they're being duped.
With referees, it's the booing of calls against the home team and the cheering of calls against the away team that creates the bulk of home-field advantage across all major sports because of how it ever so slightly influences the decisions of the referees on such an unconscious level. With our fans booing and cheering as homeristicly as any fan-base, with one of the highest capacities for fan volume on the planet, and with the heightened expectations from our SB victory, it's no wonder we're beginning to see repercussions that exceed those of other franchises
One of the underlying reasons lies, biases, and other forms of falseness can be so aggravating is because even when we know what we're observing is incorrect, determining that still required believing, if only for an instant, in its validity. Thus, when we see our striped friends make one of the blunders they've become so infamous for, many of us go through that familiar cycle starting with an internalized or even vocalized thought basically saying "Really?". What we don't realize though, is that this in fact a two-way street. We dislike when refs make calls against our guys but we loathe it when they make bad calls against our guys. For referees, they dislike it when we boo their calls against our guys but they must loathe it when we boo the obvious calls they're making.
If we want more fairness from the men in stripes, we would have to exhibit more fairness in the way we choose to react to them on game-day. If we want them to be biased but be biased in favor of us like we've mostly been doing, we can keep cheering and jeering as we are. If we want to do our part in mitigating the discrepancy in officiating toward our team and our opponents, we would need to reserve our cheers for only the good calls against our opponents and the jeers only for the poorer calls against us.
What I'm about to tell you is that while the errors of referees can be a product of corruption, inexperience, incompetence, lacking oversight, and everything else we allude to about them, they're also a product of what the fans in the stadium choose to do on game-day. With knowing what that influence is and how it works, we can help chip away at that very disparity in penalties that is hampering us today.
The basis of our influence over the referees is centered around two key quirks in human nature: Actor-observer bias and the biology behind how we determine whether something is accurate or not. Actor-observer bias, which is the tendency for people to attribute their own decisions to situational factors while attributing the decisions of others to their personality. In other words, if I trip over someone's foot on the way to my seat, I'm more likely to feel it's because I was distracted by something happening on the field or in the stands. If I'm witness to someone else tripping, I'm more likely to think they're just clumsy. When it comes to critiquing referees, we make the same oversimplification and judge them by our perception of their personalities and not by what's influencing them. This is the basis for why we haven't figured out or made ourselves aware of what fans can do to help referees assist their team. We looked only at them and not their biggest situational factor during the game: the home-team's fans.
To understand how we're such a factor, we need to understand the second quirk in human nature I mentioned regarding how we go about determining whether someone is deceiving us or not. The overall process is simple: one part of our brain will assume whatever it is presented with is true automatically and it will only be found false after higher-functions of our mind dig deeper and determine it is false. It's like our legal system stating we're innocent until proven guilty, only that our brain's governing function is to assume truth until proven false. This is why kids can trick one another by asking "Hey, did you know the word gullible isn't in the dictionary?" and generally getting a response made up of one version "Really?" or another before they realize they're being duped.
With referees, it's the booing of calls against the home team and the cheering of calls against the away team that creates the bulk of home-field advantage across all major sports because of how it ever so slightly influences the decisions of the referees on such an unconscious level. With our fans booing and cheering as homeristicly as any fan-base, with one of the highest capacities for fan volume on the planet, and with the heightened expectations from our SB victory, it's no wonder we're beginning to see repercussions that exceed those of other franchises
One of the underlying reasons lies, biases, and other forms of falseness can be so aggravating is because even when we know what we're observing is incorrect, determining that still required believing, if only for an instant, in its validity. Thus, when we see our striped friends make one of the blunders they've become so infamous for, many of us go through that familiar cycle starting with an internalized or even vocalized thought basically saying "Really?". What we don't realize though, is that this in fact a two-way street. We dislike when refs make calls against our guys but we loathe it when they make bad calls against our guys. For referees, they dislike it when we boo their calls against our guys but they must loathe it when we boo the obvious calls they're making.
If we want more fairness from the men in stripes, we would have to exhibit more fairness in the way we choose to react to them on game-day. If we want them to be biased but be biased in favor of us like we've mostly been doing, we can keep cheering and jeering as we are. If we want to do our part in mitigating the discrepancy in officiating toward our team and our opponents, we would need to reserve our cheers for only the good calls against our opponents and the jeers only for the poorer calls against us.
