It's always funny to me when conventional schoolyard wisdom is recreated in a scientific laboratory, especially when the subjects are not children. Some new research from universities in France and the United States further supports the (completely true) idea that humans are innate douches.Dominique Muller and his team of Brad Bushman, Baptiste Subra, and Emmanuelle Ceaux, performed several studies designed to track the changes in aggressiveness brought about by winning and losing. In one study, he pit over a 100 college seniors against each other in a fast-paced image matching task. The winners of the first round of competition were then given a curious job for the second round, in which the losers competed in a reaction time test (each in private), and those that didn't react fast enough on a given trial were blasted with a loud noise through headphones. The first round winners were allowed to choose both the volume and length of the sound, and the results revealed some surprisingly high levels of dickishness.When the losers of the first round were tasked with adjusting the headphone punishment, they were, across the board, way more friendly than the winners. One author on the paper, Brad Bushman, summed it up nicely in a statement, "It seems that people have a tendency to stomp down on those they have defeated, to really rub it in." Somehow, merely wining a seemingly meaningless computer game alters your psychological disposition, and makes you more likely to fuck with those you have beaten. It's what I will just now aptly dub the "Pwning Effect," alluding to the trolling victors of online video games.Bushman said that the effect is somewhat universal, writing in an email, "Our prediction would be that [this effect] cuts across spheres." That doesn't surprise me. The Pwning effect is everywhere. Countries are notoriously awful to those they beat in war, 8th grade basketball games have their fair share of "rubbing it in," and we all know politicians are rarely gracious winners.A further issue is, of course, finding out why this effect exists. Intuition tells me that it is a result of the highly hierarchical dominance structure that humans share with many of their mammalian brethren, where holding on to power demands aggression towards your subordinates. However, those structures are usually male-centered, and Bushman pointed out to me that the effect was seen pretty evenly across genders. The answer is likely something more broad concerning the psychology of dominance, as the authors write:The experience of power often comes with abundant rewards (e.g., money, good food, good health, physical comforts, and social resources, such as flattery, esteem, and praise). Second, the experience of power also comes with the impression that one can do whatever one wants without serious social consequences. This is of importance because being better off than others is very likely to be often associated with the same rewards as experiencing power. Hence, being better off than others might also activate a behavioral approach system, which could increase the likelihood of aggression.All in all, this little experiment was a nice laboratory recreation of basic human douchery. And isn't it always good to check in with ourselves?
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