Shankar Vedantam

The referee consulted the linesman who'd been in line with the posts and goal it was.

And there's huge debate over whether that goal actually crossed the line.

And so to this day, there's still controversy about whether this crossed the line.

And so what seemed to happen here is that those players wanted to interpret this ball as going over the line and being the winning goal.

The German players did not.

And so I spent an entire day like watching old videos in slow motion and pausing them to see if the goal actually crossed the line.

I looked up a study from Oxford University saying it didn't cross the line.

And so I do not think he scored.

It looked like it came down right on the goal line and bounced out.

However, the same player scored later in overtime.

And so England would have won anyways.

Yeah, and sports fans often think the referees are unfair to them because they're seeing everything through their own lens.

In fact, in Canada, there's one song that's banned from all the hockey arenas, and it's called Three Blind Mice, which people used to play, the home teams used to play when they didn't like a call.

to imply that the three refs were biased and blind.

And so this turns out that this is like a really deeply rooted problem for people.

They're so used to filtering it through their own lens, they get very upset at officials.

This, I think, is one of the most important studies in the history of psychology, maybe in the history of the social sciences.

So this was a study run by Henri Taschfeld and his colleagues.

He ran this study where he basically just randomly assigned youths to one of two groups.

And he did it on just trivial information.