I feel that there’s a strong, slightly opposite bias of “picking winners”—I couldn’t find a specific term for it (there’s BIRGing (Basking in reflected glory) and bandwagon effects). It might be interesting to see when underdog bias vs. picking winners applies.
A quick example: sports fans famously love an underdog story, but when choosing a football team to support, people from around the world without a local team almost always choose one of the strongest few teams. If underdog bias ruled, you’d see football fans around the world with T-shirts of random mid-tier sides.
Evo-psych explanations (some listed in other comments) usually seem to explain “picking winners” more reliably. From siding with an alpha-male chimp to modern geopolitics, it can be dangerous to back a loser.
But these aren’t necessarily contradictory—the optimal strategy is often picking an underdog that’s actually got a secret weapon (e.g. David vs. Goliath). If you commit to siding with an underdog that wins, the payoffs are probably greater than siding with a winning overdog.
Slightly unrelated, there’s also a debate as to the universality of underdog bias. While the headline is that it’s somewhat universal, this paper (small sample, contrived experiment) finds that Israeli and Chinese respondents are slightly less underdog-prone than Japanese and American respondents. I sense there is something there—I often find “pro-overdog” narratives in Chinese media jarring. The theory might be that some cultures are more respecting of natural hierarchies or something
A few thoughts on this:
I feel that there’s a strong, slightly opposite bias of “picking winners”—I couldn’t find a specific term for it (there’s BIRGing (Basking in reflected glory) and bandwagon effects). It might be interesting to see when underdog bias vs. picking winners applies.
A quick example: sports fans famously love an underdog story, but when choosing a football team to support, people from around the world without a local team almost always choose one of the strongest few teams. If underdog bias ruled, you’d see football fans around the world with T-shirts of random mid-tier sides.
Evo-psych explanations (some listed in other comments) usually seem to explain “picking winners” more reliably. From siding with an alpha-male chimp to modern geopolitics, it can be dangerous to back a loser.
But these aren’t necessarily contradictory—the optimal strategy is often picking an underdog that’s actually got a secret weapon (e.g. David vs. Goliath). If you commit to siding with an underdog that wins, the payoffs are probably greater than siding with a winning overdog.
Slightly unrelated, there’s also a debate as to the universality of underdog bias. While the headline is that it’s somewhat universal, this paper (small sample, contrived experiment) finds that Israeli and Chinese respondents are slightly less underdog-prone than Japanese and American respondents. I sense there is something there—I often find “pro-overdog” narratives in Chinese media jarring. The theory might be that some cultures are more respecting of natural hierarchies or something