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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!
Taking more shots doesn't mean you perform better. Neither does scoring more points.
A strong component of the psychological training that went into a samurai's upbringing , especially after the combination of zen buddhism with shintoism, was to actually consider the possibility of defeat, so that you could be better prepared. By refusing to acknowledge defeat, you did not factor in your own weaknesses, thus leaving yourself open.
A major component of Ninja mental indoctrination was the concept of considering yourself already dead, so you had nothing to fear in that regard.
You do know that Logan's Run wasn't an athletic event, right?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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
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!
Let's also keep in mind, we don't have a collection of the contemporary saying of .... Genghis Khan-era Mongols.
Yes we do, you can buy it yourself today.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."