The Roar of the Crowd - Sports fans' primal behavior

[GracchusBabeuf]

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[Black Sheep]

Don't you underestimate religion..its moral branches are all-powerful and cannot be even remotely compared with sports..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLbckGjuYpk

[DesertShark]

Don't underestimate people in mass or people following orders.
Check out the Stanford Prison Experiment (http://www.prisonexp.org/slide-1.htm) and the Milgram experiment (book: ISBN 0-06-131983-X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/006131983X)). Or watch this video (narrated by the dude that did the Stanford Prison Experiment): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6059627757980071729
It appears people become stupid and easily manipulated when in a group or the ones that don't become afraid of being excluded.

[mikelepore]

How does that make Marx wrong? Did Germany in 1844 have a significant amount of madness about the collegiate basketball season?

[Pogue]

I like sports, I'm very much into it and the culture, banter etc, and I'm an Anarchist.






:tt2:

[Diagoras]

The question is why. It is arbitrary support (in many cases, intense emotional investment) for "teams" of persons based upon questionable or absent foundations. Appreciation for unique feats of human skill/strength/etc. is one thing. What is the point of generating arbitrary rivalries and divisions in a pseudo-nationalistic fashion, investing large amounts of resources into such things,etc? Not that all friendly competition is bad, of course, but the scale and scope of organized sporting, and the identities that are formulated around such things don't make any sense to me.