Slashdot Mirror
Study Finds That Athletes Perform Better When Reminded of Their Impending Death (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Basketball players that were grimly reminded of their own inevitable demise before playing took more shots and scored more points in a study published in an upcoming issue of Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. The researchers behind the experiments hypothesize that the pep-talk tactic fits with the established "terror management theory," which proposes that humans are motivated to seek self-esteem, meaning, and symbolic immortality -- in this case becoming a famous athlete -- in order to manage their fear of death. For the study, Helm and colleagues first recruited basketball players to play two back-to-back, one-on-one games with lead researcher Colin Zestcott, another psychologist at the University of Arizona. (The players didn't know that Zestcott was a researcher; they thought he was another study participant.) After the first game, half of the participants were randomly assigned to take a questionnaire on how they felt about basketball. The other half took one about their thoughts on their own death. Those that took the spooky survey saw a 40-percent boost in their individual performance during the second game as compared with their first. Those that took the non-macabre survey saw no change. In a second experiment, participants were given a basket-shooting challenge, which a researcher described to them in a 30-second tutorial. Based on a coin-toss, half the participants got the tutorial while the researcher was wearing a plain jacket. The other half saw the researcher in a T-shirt with a skull-shaped word-cloud made entirely of the word 'death.' The participants' performance on the shooting challenge was then scored by another researcher who didn't know which players saw the death shirt. In the end, players who did see the shirt took more shots, and outperformed by 30 percent, those that just saw the jacket. "We've known from many studies that reminders of death arouse a need for terror management and therefore increase self-esteem striving through performance on relatively simple laboratory tasks," Peter Helm, a study co-author and psychologist at the University of Arizona, said in a news release. "However, these experiments are the first to show that activating this motivation can influence performance on complex, real-world behaviors."
Some of those Christians probably put on a pretty good show for the drunken coliseum crowds.
riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!
"Tomorrow will be the best day of his life..."
More-so in Rollerball.
It helps when the crowd shouts your name over the corpses of your opponents.
Needed all that endorphin to sleep tight tonight.
Taking more shots doesn't mean you perform better. Neither does scoring more points.
Or Death Race...or Logan's Run...
...to the threat of mobsters breaking your kneecaps if you lose?
Also, when are they going to run the experiment on programmers?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Carlos Castaneda's (fictional) sage in Journey to Ixtlan.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
One of the best samurai warlord, Uesugi Kenshin said this,
"If you fight willing to die, you'll survive; if you fight trying to survive, you'll die. If you think you'll never go home again, you will; if you hope to make it back, you won't."
"Win or we'll kill you."
Sounds like a middle-management position for death camps.
Well Duh! Why else do you think I keep yelling "I'm gonna kill you soon!" at Lebron from my court-side seats?
Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.
The death T-shirt sounds like an interpretable and unreliable element which makes the results useless. The study should be done again with better mechanisms though.
It wasn't mentioned if they meant 'We're all gonna die someday, so go make your mark while you can!' or more of the 'Comrade, you may die someday, but if you fail today that someday might not come soon enough.' type of motivation.
But you'll never be here again. Take it easy.
No wait, try hard! It works in practice too. Chuck Knoll would tell players they only get one time through so practice hard, but thats not his exact quote.
The Jewish dog internees at Auschwitz and Dachau worked at a Feverish pitch 24-7 without break. Were it not for them, Germany would have been the laughing stock to all the World right.
important article.Thanks for this.
"Impending" death? Is this a story about the mafia fixing matches?
See that "Preview" button?
It's bordering on pseudoscience now thanks to people publishing shit paper after shit paper with results that can't be reproduced in order to keep the funding flowing.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
"Good night, Wesley. Sleep tight. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."
--The Dread Pirate Roberts
Didn't really work out too well.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
For whom the reminder is a little more immediate. As in, "if you don't win, we will shoot you and your family"...
Inside the wrappers of bubble gum, long ago were jokes on little slips of paper.
One went
A winning jockey whispered to his horse --
"Roses are red
Violets are blue
Horses that lose
Are made into glue
The jockey that whispered into his mount ear during a race:
Roses are red
violets are blue
horses that loose
turn into glue
So that's why China and North Korea have been performing so well lately in the Olympics, right?
SENS Research Foundation are working towards reversing aging in humans - which of course mans you no longer die from aging, and live young on an ongoing basis.
The basic problem of being alive is that living wears our the body - like driving a car around; doing so *is* what you do with a car, and doing so wears it out. Actually making a body which doesn't wear out is like making a car which doesn't wear out - i.e. basically impossible. However, figuring out how to repair the damage from aging looks viable - there seem to be about six or seven main consequences of aging. Deal with those, and you're pretty much done.
Omet'iklan: I am First Omet'iklan, and I am dead. As of this moment, we are all dead. We go into battle to reclaim our lives. This we do gladly, for we are Jem'Hadar. Remember: victory is life.
Jem'Hadar: Victory is life!
[the Jem'Hadar march out]
Weyoun: Such a delightful people.
[O'Brien turns to face the assembled Federation officers]
O'Brien: I am Chief Miles Edward O'Brien. I am very much alive, and I intend to stay that way.
Sisko: Amen! Let's get it done!
but thankfully women are doing their part to help prevent all the 400lb basement dwellers out there dropping dead from heart attacks.
For a few, such "terror management" could backfire and force some actions a little different from what is desired.
Be careful!
Source: unfortunately, from first-hand experience.
Athletes Perform Better When Reminded of Their Impending Death ...
especially when symbolised by Godzilla runing after them.
The entire point of sports is to compete without fear of death or else it would be called WAR.
If you keep doing this to athletes for decades, do you still have an improvement?
John_Chalisque
Remember this - You are going to die. Life is fleeting and has but one conclusion. We are all temporary, we will all be forgotten.
I have a memory of an Ancient Greece Olympic Games wrestler who immediately after achieving the winning fall (submission, whatever) deliberately let his opponent choke him to death so that he (the dead wrestler) would achieve immortality as an undefeated champion. Or something like that.
My memory may be fallible, because I can't find a citation. But this is close:
Arrhichion won the Pankration, an empty-hand submission sport blending boxing and wrestling with scarcely any rules, at the 52nd and 53rd Olympiads (572 BCE and 568 BCE, respectively). His fatal fight [564 BCE] was described by the geographer Pausanias and by Philostratus the Younger. According to Pausanias:
For when he was contending for the wild olive with the last remaining competitor, whoever he was, the latter got a grip first, and held Arrhachion, hugging him with his legs, and at the same time he squeezed his neck with his hands. Arrhachion dislocated his opponent's toe, but expired owing to suffocation; but he who suffocated Arrhachion was forced to give in at the same time because of the pain in his toe. The Eleans crowned and proclaimed victor the corpse of Arrhachion.
Philostratus of Athens writes in his Gymnasticus that Arrichion's failure to submit to his opponent was the result of his trainer, Eryxias, shouting to him, "What a noble epitaph, 'He was never defeated at Olympia.'
Psychology has proven very effective in the treatment of various mental health problems, especially depression. To say that it's pseudoscience is just wrong. The issue of reproducability is mostly just a red herring - clearly it's impossible to reproduce mental states exactly and people live in the uncontrolled real world, which is why rather than trying to reverse time psychologists concentrate on understanding results and then applying them experimentally on a scale that makes individual circumstances less significant.
In other words, something like CBT seems like bunk, impossible to reproduce reliably with individuals, but when you apply it to a large number of people suffering from depression there is a very significant improvement over the control group.
Many other sciences work that way only to a lesser degree, especially biology and medicine. How are you going to duplicate the exact same cancer in the exact same patient? You don't, you develop treatments, write papers, people try them on larger numbers of patients...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!
Only if the people surveyed think death is something to be worried about. People aren't that one-dimensional, folks. Nothing to see here, moving on. Yawn.
is that so? I'm sure some psychology is science, but the fact is that a lot of it isn't.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
> Study Finds That Athletes Perform Better When Reminded of Their Impending Death
There was an 1962 hungarian movie, titled Two Halves in Hell, about a group of concentration camp inmates forced to play soccer against a team made up of their nazi guards. In 1980, it was adopted into a Hollywood movie with Stallone in the lead (titled Escape to Victory) which was filmed on location in Hungary, apparently as a kind of gratitude for the original idea.
> Study Finds That Athletes Perform Better When Reminded of Their Impending Death
Does this research apply to athletes only, as the thesis suggests? I mean Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is not know to be an olympic medalist, despite his To be or not to be... monologue
Then how come the Iraqi national teams under Uday Hussein weren't more prolific? Death was surely in the forefront of their minds.
Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called on priming researchers to check the robustness of their findings in an open letter to the community, claiming that priming has become a "poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research." Other critics have asserted that priming studies suffer from major publication bias, experimenter effect and that criticism of the field is not dealt with constructively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29#Criticism
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
"The issue of reproducability is mostly just a red herring - clearly it's impossible to reproduce mental states exactly..."
This is not what reproducibility means. Do you work in psychology?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
In Zen we call this contemplating the Void. The concept is that the more you focus on yourself, the center of your experience, the more rooted and hung up you become. You basically become like a microphone that's feeding back. You develop an inertia against almost any sort of action, be it participating in a relationship, flying an airplane, or sports performance. Being reminded of death helps unroot you. You begin to see that being so focused on the very middle of what you are is a losing proposition, and your attention therefore necessarily reaches out. These players didn't perform better in order to make a name for themselves to survive their death - quite the opposite. They played better because they were relieved, just a tiny bit, of the burden of self-concern and could focus on the fucking game.
Worked for the gladiators
Impending means 'near at hand,' not 'inevitable.' If I were dying soon, I don't think I'd care about winning a game or not.
Better than motivational posters!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
There was a large CBT meta study within the past two years and it showed CBT isn't as effective as most people believe. Everyone needs to remember that the placebo effect for depression is extremely strong. Have you ever been depressed? I have. Just being able to attend your CBT meeting each time can be viewed as an accomplishment and that sense of accomplishment helps lighten your depression. You need to take into account factors like that when trying to determine the effectiveness of CBT as a treatment. Sure CBT works for a lot of people, but was it the actual CBT that helped or was it the perception of everything else?
Studies show hypnosis to be more effective than CBT. The only people I know of who don't consider hypnosis to be pseudoscience are the ones who practice it (so about 4 people consider it real and 3 of those only use it for sex play). If you don't believe in hypnosis then you shouldn't believe in the treatments less effective than it.
I'm not saying CBT is bad, it's way better than anti-depressant meds, I'm saying good science is hard and bad science is easy to view as good science.
CBT = Cognitive Behavior Therapy
OR
CBT = Cock and Ball Torture
How you interpret this acronym determines how entertaining the previous post is.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I mean, reminding athletes about their mortality, to get better performance? Why not just torture their Mother and Father? How about, win or we kill your spouse? How about cutting off limbs not critical to their sport, "because that is just a distraction?"
There is dedication and commitment. And then there is crazy and lack of perspective. Seems to me like this falls into the latter category.
Somehow I read this as how well North Korea athletes do at the Olympics knowing that if they don't...
but better motivational posters period!:
Send your TPS report today! You could be dead tomorrow. (And don't forget the new coversheet!)
That's why Goth, Death Metal and Industrial music sounds better than other styles. I tell ya.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Want to bet this appears on next year's igNobel awards?