Shankar Vedantam

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.

So what type of abstract art they liked.

And these young people didn't know these artists at all.

And in fact, it didn't matter who they actually liked.

He just flipped a coin and gave them false feedback anyways.

And what he found is that the moment that you're part of a team or part of a group, you will give more money to members of your in-group and less money to the out-group, even if you never interact or meet those people, even if you never expect that they'll meet you.

And the thing he also found is that what people really care about is maximizing the difference in money they give to the in-group and out-group.