I’ve never been that into sports. I went to baseball games when my family went, I only watch SportsCenter when my brother won’t relinquish the clicker, and I used to only go to Super Bowl parties for the commercials and food.
Since college, though, football has taken hold of my heart, and although I’m not exactly a football buff, I know most of the rules and I love watching the game. The football rivalry between the Oregon Ducks and Oregon State Beavers is one of my favorite things about attending the University. Walking down the street after we’ve won (or even lost) a game, where everyone is just as excited or depressed, screaming “Go Ducks!” at the top of their lungs and loving you just for responding in kind is an amazing bonding experience.
One of the best things about the rivalry is the fact that my traitorous older brother Max is a dirty, stinking Beaver himself. It makes for excellent bets (which he mostly loses) and adds another layer onto the complicated psychological parfait that is the sibling rivalry.
So when I opened my new Scientific American Mind magazine to an article about the psychology of rivalry, I got interested. Rivalries can do many good things for a group — teams or individuals generally perform better when facing their rivals; scientists have found higher testosterone levels in soccer players who were playing a rival team; and competitive racers ran faster when up against rival.
However, as many of us know, rivalries can turn ugly in an instant. In many psychological studies done at various universities, researchers have found that rivalries can easily skew judgment, mess with our memories and tweak our moral codes. Members or fans of each rival team are more likely to remember events differently. Psychologists studied male rival fans watching their teams duke it out — and afterward tested their memories of certain plays. It turned out that the fans remembered specific events better if the play ended up beneficial for their own team. They also found that after having a negative encounter with a rival (running into a hostile Beavers fan, for instance), someone is more likely to commit small indecencies, like telling a white lie or blowing through a stop sign.
“Schadenfreude” is a German term for that little rush of ecstasy you get when you witness someone else’s misfortune. It’s why we like America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s also why all my Beaver friends love to watch the Ducks lose (my own brother hosted a “Support Auburn” party), and why all my Duck friends love to watch the Beavers lose. Schadenfreude also has a lot to do with the development of prejudice. This rivalry between the Ducks and the Beavers has harvested such negative feelings between mere strangers that prejudices inevitably arise. All of my Beaver friends have witnessed or experienced disgusting antics by Ducks fans, and I’ve heard many a Beaver admit that the default setting on their feelings for Duck fans is “red-hot hatred.”
Considering recent events in the Ducks/Beavers rivalry extravaganza, I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised. But sometimes the friendly rivalry can go too far, from a good-natured screaming match to actual violence. Some of my Beaver friends (yes, God forbid, I actually have Beaver friends) have reported getting spit on, having piss or beer dumped on them, and even being physically assaulted by Ducks fans. At the 2010 Civil War game, after the Ducks owned the Beavers with a final score of 37-20, Ducks fans rushed the field and burned a Beavers-related T-shirt, setting fire to the field.
The Beavers didn’t have a great season this year, but they did play relatively better against the Ducks in the Civil War than they did at other games. I love my Ducks, and yeah, I suppose I do giggle to myself whenever I witness a Beaver loss, but I’m not about to go punch a Beaver in the face and leave a flaming bag of poo on his porch. I love the rivalry, and I love to verbally abuse the Beavers in my life (especially Max and his dirty, stinking Beaver friends), but deep down, I don’t really mean what I say to them — we are all still friends in the end. You can jokingly swear at someone; you can’t jokingly throw a cup of piss.
Rivalries bring people together to bond, cheer, yell, scream, root and sometimes cry. It’s when the rivalry becomes violent and prejudiced that I’m no longer interested in participating.
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