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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."
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!
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
Some of those Christians probably put on a pretty good show for the drunken coliseum crowds.
Some of those Christians probably put on a pretty good show for the drunken coliseum crowds.
I believe that if you are ready to die for Christ, especially in the -"entertaining"- way(s) those early Christians did, then you do it without much "drama" - so, for a good "Colosseum show" you need people that do NOT have a belief in love and forgiveness...
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."
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.
Makes me wonder if some of the condemned were praising the Caesar or giving themselves a pep talk
"Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant"
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"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
I see we have a student of The Prachett
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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
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!
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!
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.
I believe that if you are ready to die for Christ, especially in the -"entertaining"- way(s) those early Christians did, then you do it without much "drama" - so, for a good "Colosseum show" you need people that do NOT have a belief in love and forgiveness...
Love and forgiveness? We're talking about Christians you know.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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
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
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.
Somehow I read this as how well North Korea athletes do at the Olympics knowing that if they don't...
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?