Pushkin. I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules. If you've been listening to this season on Sports Gambling, then you already know that at the heart of everything is one thing human psychology. How to understand the passion of fans, how to play mind games with them. It just so happens that there's another show in my neighborhood here at Pushkin. It's all about human psychology and what research tells us about our own minds. That's the Happiness Lab,
hosted by doctor Laurie Santos. Laurie's a psychology professor at Yale. In a while back, she did an episode that grabbed my attention. It's called nerd Out, The Happiness of Being a Fan. It starts with the story of a woman who became obsessed with a British actor, Benedict Cumberbatch, and it's delightful. Here's Laurie asking the big questions about fan psychology.
Could embracing a deep love of a seemingly trivial thing and doing so openly and without guilt be the key to feeling more connected and more present? Would each of us become a lot happier if we two could at least metaphorically get cumber batched.
Now, Laurie's episode is about cultural fandom, obviously, but I suspected you'd have some interesting things to say about sports fandom and gambling on sports. So I went to my studio and she went to hers, and we had the conversation you're about to hear there is Laurie.
Santos, Hey, folks has a gun.
I feel cumber batched, and I want to get to sports gaming. But I do want to talk briefly about fandom because you did that episode on Benedict Cumberbatch. Because first start, when I was listening to you, we'll talk about, you know, fangirling on shows and all that kind of thing.
It felt kind of mild compared to sports fandom. That it felt, you know, although consuming the behavior wasn't anything like as insane as as you see with sports fans getting close with Benadict Cumberbatch, but that was an extreme and I'm warning you. Do you group sports fans in this category? Is it a parasocial relationship being a sports fan?
I think sometimes. I mean, I think sports fandom has a couple other different features. Right, So sports teams at least a lot of the kind of canonical sports teams you can think about the NBA or baseball teams or whatever. They also have a feature that activates our sort of group psychology. Right, So with Benedict Cumberbatch, you're a fan of Benedict Cumberbatch, but you don't see yourself as like
a Red Sox fan or like a Patriots fan or something. Sorry, I'm a Boston sports person, so those are going to be all my examples, right. That kind of group psychology is really different because it's not like the Benedict Cumberbatch fans like hate some other actor and like really want to take him down, right, But as a Red Sox fan, like I grew up like hating the Yankees, right, if somebody is a Yankees hat, I'm like, that person is not my group. They are the enemy, right, And that's
a special part of our group psychology. It doesn't just activate the kind of positive belonging part. It also activates the kind of not so good, I don't like you, you are not like me sort of part. And I feel like that psychologically makes fandom a lot more powerful, right, because it kind of gives us both the kind of belonging side, like, oh, I'm like these people who like the same things that I do. But it also comes with the like I don't like those people, Like my
group doesn't like this other set of people. And I think that this plays in sports betting a lot. My guess is, sometimes, you know, if I'm a Red Sox fan and I make a sports bed on Red Sox, sometimes that's like I love the Red Sox and they're going to do great. And sometimes it's like screw the Yankees or f the Yankee, you know, like words we're not gonna say on your podcast towards the Yankees. It's about kind of who you don't like, who you're sort of kind of fighting against.
That's second range of emotion. Yeah, we're not just for, we're against.
Yeah, and sometimes that against can be powerful.
But is it happiness inducing?
I think when the team beats the Yankees, maybe.
You know, like you knows, like I'm for whatever teams playing the Yankees?
Is it going to make me happy to go looking for for tribes to join to tack other tribes? If my goal is happiness, is that behavior a tool to achieve the goal?
Yeah, well it might be how we're we're defining happiness right, it definitely gives us a certain kind of positive emotion, right, you know, schadenfreude. We can, you know, talk morally about whether or not it's a good emotion to have. Definitely feels pretty good when something bad is happening to some group that you don't like.
You know, think about whether it feels really good when something bad happens to someone. I'd yes, okay, yeah, I thought of an example. Okay that works. Yes, it actually made me a little I can remember feeling happy again.
Not all positive emotions, I think are ones that we morally want to push for, right, And I think that's why I said, we want to think about our definition of happiness. I think of happiness really as being about living a good, rich life that includes a moral life. Right. I don't want to have, you know, seemingly short positive emotions that feel good but are kind of yucky when I think about how they play out in the world.
Right.
So we might want to reject schadenfreude as part of a happy life, but kind of sometimes feels good, And we'd be lying if we didn't admit that, at least in some context.
Yeah. So this fan identity, it plays a role in happiness.
Well, let's talk Let's talk about the positive side, because we've been on the Schadenfreuda side for.
A while and I kind of it's the positive side.
Do you feel like you're experiencing a sense of belonging? Right, we're Red Sox fans. We believe in the same things. We cheer when the home team, you know, scores, like all that stuff feels good in part because of the sense of belonging, right, we kind of feel like we're part of something bigger. But there's also just mechanisms that
good things are better when they're shared. Literally. There's some studies where you bring people into the lab and have them eat a chocolate bar, either at the same time as some other people in the lab are eating the chocolate bar who they can't talk to. It's just like they know they're eating at the same time, or as
when that second person is doing something else. And what you find is that the chocolate bar literally tastes better when you're experiencing it at the same time as somebody else, right, you know, And so think about a stadium full of fans watching a goal scored at the same time as everybody else, Right, If that psychological mechanism is in place. Those kind of moments of triumph feel even better because you're experiencing them with other folks.
But does it also amplify the feelings of loss when things go wrong?
Oh for sure. Yeah. They also have they have experiments having you eating a terrible chocolate bar, and yeah, terrible things feel more terrible when you go through them with other funds.
So you're getting just you're just getting a more extreme experience of life.
The emotion shared emotions are amplified, whether that's the glory of the win or the agony of defeat. You and you didn't need a psychology study to tell you.
That, right, No you didn't. No you didn't, But it isn't. It's an interesting question why people want the amplification and are willing to take the risk of the amplification in both directions.
I think there is like a little bit of misery loves company, or we can kind of you know, covetch together as a Red Sox fan. You know, before the Red Sox were winning in the early two thousands, for most of my teams, you know, being a Red Sox fan was about covetching together with the other Bostonian friends of mine, And there's a certain kind of camaraderie in the like underdog identity too that I think folks get something out of.
We imagine a stadium full of little happiness meters, these people who are experienced seeing something, and happiness is going up and happiness is going down when you introduce phones and individual bets to every meter, so that and everybody is making their own bet rather than actually just rooting for the team. And the bet isn't as simple as
I'm betting on the team. You might be betting on the team to win by eight points instead of four points, so you might be betting on some player, so everybody, actually the agenda is all of a sudden fragment, and the whole place is a bunch of individuals on their phones with their bets. What's going to happen to happiness there?
Yeah, well, I think it becomes a little bit of less of a shared experience, right. I've seen it more in the context of say concerts and things like that, where you go to a concert and you see everybody pulling out their phone and sort of watching things. But then they take their phone down, they like clip it and they send it to their friend, and so no one's actually watching or present or engaging with the event.
And I think there must be some of that going on in the sports betting case, right where you're actually not paying attention to the game because you are hopping on these sites to kind of make these bets in real time and sort of not paying attention to things. So I think, like many aspects of our technology, the ability to do these bets is sort of pulling us out of the experience and taking us away from the presence that would be kind of the most fun part
of the game in a lot of ways. So I think it's making us less mindfully aware of what's going on. And study after study shows that not being present is
kind of a hit on our enjoyment, our happiness. Right, But it's happening at the same time as you're with these kind of little tiny side bets, you know, kind of upping the stakes a little bit for the win of your team, Right, there's a sort of anticipatory benefit of like, now I'm going to win some money if my team wins by aid or within eight seconds or whatever the bet is, Like, now there's something else at stake kind of matters more to me, and that kind
of you know, risky decision making, as you know, can have some benefits, especially in the anticipation phase when you're sort of thinking, you know what, if I win, it sort of makes it a little bit more exciting. And I think these things are just bumping up the arousal and the happiness meters of all the folks who are watching these games. I think it obviously has some like major drawbacks, but in the moment, you know, some of these things might be amplifying other effects of the game too.
What do you think of as major drawbacks.
Well, I think that these sites are kind of playing on people's sense of belonging in ways that are causing people who don't really understand this stuff to lose a lot of money.
What do you mean by that they're playing on their sense of belonging.
Well, I mean my sense is that, like you know, you see these commercials of your sports heroes or these celebrities that you see online or influencers who are doing this stuff. We're like, look at me, I'm on this sports betting site and making all this money and making these things, and you feel like, well, I want to be like that person, Like I'm going to jump on there too, right, you know, it feels like the kind
of cool thing to do. This is kind of playing into our sense of status or sense of belonging and being the kind of person who's smart enough to get in on this fun thing where you can make some money.
And I think in the context of sports betting, you're often betting on a team that you care about, right, So it's kind of activating belonging from all these different different pathways, right, But is often doing that in a way that people are like literally losing their life savings or especially for some of the young people that are
getting involved in this. And I think more and more sports betting is about young people who maybe shouldn't be on these sites in the first place, and maybe making choices and decisions in the short term that they're going to really regret in the long term. And that kind of regret is not great for happiness.
I could not agree more. When we return, I asked Lori Santos about the psychology of the teenage brain. I'm back with doctor Lorie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab. We started talking about my seventeen year old son Walker, who was the subject of this show a few weeks back, and that episode was still in the works when I spoke to Laurie, so she hadn't heard it, but not surprisingly, she had some incredible insights on teen psychology and sports gambling.
So I was asked to teach my high school senior son's narrative nonfiction class. He it's an English elective. The teachers say, you know, we read your stuff, Come on over to my son's mortification. I went in and it was an interactive thing, and my son, very interestingly, knowing the subject of the podcast, said I got a question for the class. Could anybody raise their hand? Who engages in sports betting? And the boys were all on one side of the room and the girls were on the other.
I don't know what's going on there, but it was like they just segregated by gender naturally. And they were like, I don't know, twenty girls and thirteen boys. All but one of the boys raises their hands. None of the girls zero. What's going on there? Like, why is this so gendered? Why is it that boys brains are activated in this way? Why aren't girls cumber batching over this thing too?
Yeah, well, I think they're cumber batching about their own kind of stuff, right. I mean, I think partly the marketing of these sites is really aimed at boys more than girls. I mean, like, I mean, I just watched some of these commercials and it feels gendered to me. Even the voices that are used like drug like.
It's not it's not aimed. It's not aimed at thirteen year old Lorie. It's aimed at like somebody.
Thirteen year old Laurie. How would it sound?
I don't know. I mean I think there'd be different influencers, maybe be like, you know, I don't know, somebody putting on makeup and talking about sports betting or something, right, Like like there's a whole there's whole sets of marketing that work incredibly well for young women, right, And that's not what these sites are using. Right. I think historically sports has been like male pursuit, particularly like watching sports has been a male pursuit. I think that's changing with
people like Caitlin Clark and others. I think we're about to see a real heyday of women in sports, but we're not kind of there yet, And so it makes sense that sort of sports betting is sort of playing into male identity. And I think even if you look at the history of gambling addictions in general, like, again, all of these things are overlapping distributions, but you know, they tend to a little bit skew mail, right, And so I think the sites are kind of playing on that.
It's in a domain that's sort of exciting to boys generally. It's using media that are really exciting to boys generally, right, kind of like it's like more adjacent to sort of video game use, is jumping into sports betting right on your phones versus like, I don't know, watching Instagram reals
of makeup tutorials and so on. But I think adolescent brains in general are like prone to risk taking and prone to really seeking out belonging in whatever form it's sort of presented, And so I feel like these cues to belonging are especially salient to young boys too.
So that's what's going on the belonging side of things. If other boys are doing it.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know about the one kid of the thirteen who didn't raise his hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if after that getting called out in the classroom be like, you know, pulled out his phone and looked into one of these things too.
Right.
I mean, I think there's a sense there's a lot of work in psychology showing the phenomena what it's called social proof, right, like the fact that everybody's doing it feels like I should be doing it, right, I'm kind of missing out if I'm not doing it. And I think this is one of the things that unfortunately podcasts
like this by contribute to. When we start talking about like, oh my god, all these teen boys are on sports betting sites, that actually makes it more likely that all the teen boys will jump on sports betting sites, right, because there's a sense in which this is something that you know, teens do. And I think this is a problem for all these things that we don't want teens to be doing, or that we want teens to be doing.
When we talk about how like, oh, so many teens are evaping, or so many teens aren't voting, right, so many young people aren't voting. When young people hear that, an aspect of their psychology says, well, if everybody's not doing it, then I shouldn't do it. That's a like not for me to do right in the field of social science. This has talked about as so called descriptive
norms becoming prescriptive norms. What does that mean. Well, when you describe some statistic like many teen boys are sports betting, that becomes in sunsets proscriptive. It's like, well, then many teen boys should be sports betting, Like that's just kind
of what you do. That's the norm out there, So I'm going to follow that norm too, And so I think we have to be careful as we talk about these statistics because as people hear more of these statistics, it becomes the kind of thing that people tend to do over time.
So what do we do to dissuade young men from jumping into sports gambling? If we're doing a podcast on sports gambling?
Yeah, well, I think the one way to figure out how best to motivate teens is to really think carefully about like what teen brains are built for. And I think in some ways what they're really built for is sort of seeking out status, becoming part of the group, right, Like that's the young adult problem if you think evolutionarily, like when you're a kid, you're just kind of figuring
out the world and so on. But as a teenager kind of making the transition to adulthood, and one of the things you have to pay attention to is kind of where's my place right, where's my sense of agency? How do I fit in? How do I gain respect and status? How do I find my tribe?
Right?
Like, these are the kind of the problems that the teen brain is sort of trying to solve, and it's doing that in a context where you know, your frontal lobe is still developing. You're a little bit more risk seeking when it comes to solving those problems. Right. So, one way not to motivate a brain that's seeking out agency and status and respect and belonging is to tell that brain what to do. It's to be like sports betting is really bad for you. You shouldn't do it.
I'm going to prevent you from doing it, right, It's like the worst way to motivate teenagers, and it's kind of a bad way to motivate just like humans in general, just like telling them what to you know, I think, what the last time you know, your spouse or a
good friend like told you what to do? I mean, if you're like me, you might just have like a moment of like, well, I don't want to, like just almost like reactants against that, like I don't want to do it, And that kind of reactance is way huger in teenagers, right, So telling people, hey, don't do this, it's you know, it just gets people to want to do it even more sometimes, especially teenagers. Better way to motivate teenagers is to appeal to that sense of respect
and agency. Be like, look, you're a sixteen right now. You're smart, right, You're like really technologically savvy. What are these companies trying to do?
You know?
Do you think they, like are giving you the agency that you deserve, or do you think they're trying to hook you in? Look at what they're doing with these celebrities who are advertising to you. Look at the way they set up you know, the way these games work to kind of hook you in. Like they're not giving you agency, they're trying to sucker you, and you're not
a sucker, right. I think that kind of messaging would work even better, And there's some hints that that is the case, because if you look at the few kinds of successful marketing campaigns to teens for other kind of public health hazards, I'm thinking of things like cigarettes and so on. The kinds of things that have worked well have sort of used that move.
You know.
Cigarette ads that worked terribly were like smoking kills, like don't smoke like students are like kills like that's cool, it's really you know, like that's like a way to gain my own agency. That doesn't work. But the smoking ads that have worked historically are the ones that have said, look, these cigarette companies know that they're killing you, Like they like know they're causing you harm, and they're trying to hook you to this thing that's like really addictive. Like
you're smart. Do you want to like give in to these folks that like, you know, think that they can have control over you and hook you to this thing and get you when you're young so that you stick with them. You don't want to do that? What do you want to do? Push back?
Right?
Those kinds of ads of showing these kind of evil you know, CEOs of the man, like hooking kids to cigarettes, those ones actually had an impact and got kids to quit or not start up more often. Right, I think we could use the same kind of campaign against sports betting. It's like these sites they know what they're doing, they're not stupid. They're hooking you in. They're targeting you right like you're an agent. You know you are the kind
of person that's afforded respect. You should You're too smart to fall for that, right, That kind of marketing work is way better.
They're trying and trying to make you look stupid by losing exactly.
That's at the sort of societal level. But you could ask a different question, which is, like, you know, if you're a parent listening to this right now, and you have a team who's kind of caught up in this, right, you want to help, but you can't be like no, I'm going to take your phone away or just don't do that, Like that's not going to work. What's a sort of strategy that you can do to sort of mirror that respectful kind of get them to be agentive
about the situation? And researchers have come up with this kind of path forward that they call collaborative troubleshooting right where you can again kind of treat your kid or whoever you're trying to negotiate with as an agent and you start from this place of respect. You could even start from like, look, you know, I know you're a smart kid, right, and I just kind of want to understand, like, what are you getting out of this?
Right?
Like, I know you're doing this for a good reason, right, Like, I know, like there's probably a good reason. It's either fun or what like, talk through me what you're getting out of it?
Right?
Starting point number one, you're treating with respect. I know you've thought about this. You know, you probably have come up with your own good reasons why to do this, because otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. What's going on? Let's talk through it right Step number one. Your kid when they back to you with what their reasons, they might say some things, and then I think what you first want to do is sort of validate some of them.
There might be good ones, like you know, you enjoy the game, you think it's fun, right, your friends are doing it. You want to see what it's like. There's all this hype like those those are in some ways reasonable reasons to go check something out and do it, right, But you're also hearing some of the downsides, like maybe they've lost some money, or maybe they don't like it,
or maybe they feel stuck. That's when the kind of collaborative troubleshooting comes out as you said, Okay, well, you know, given that part about you feeling stuck, like, how can we do this a little bit better? Like I'm sure you can come up with some strategies to like, you know, fix this a little like like maybe like what would you do with your phone different if you don't want to be on these sites as much? You know, or how can we You've probably thought about some boundaries that
you can come up with. What are some right, So it's kind of like you're assuming they're AGENTA and they have their own ideas, but you're kind of helping them pull it out in a way that's really respectful and so on. And so if you're a parent who's kind of dealing with a team who's negotiating some of this stuff, I think that's a really a much more effective strategy than just telling them what to do, because you get them to realize, like, oh, I have the solution myself
to figuring this out. I can identify the problem myself, and then you kind of feel like it's your solution rather than one that was forced upon you.
We're going to take a quick break when we return, I asked Laurie Degrade, my sports gambling experiment with Walker. I'm back with doctor Lori Santos. Can I tell you my two solutions. You can tell me why they were stupid?
Please? Yeah, I'm sure they weren't that stupid.
The first was to give my son five thousand dollars just and assume he was going to vaporize it, and give him smart people, not me, to talk to, like real pro sports gamblers who beat the house constantly, that kind of thing, and have him talk to them about the bets he was making and why he was making them, and be able to ask him anything he wanted to
ask them. And I assume that he'd be sitting there having heard from smart people, not me, why he shouldn't make these bets, and he lost all the money, and that was humiliating. And it's a bit like my father, which happened when I was like fifteen, sticking a glass of whiskey in my hands in New Orleans and saying, drink this because it's going to people going to make you drink this stuff. I want to be here while you're going to supervise this. It's sort of this inoculation
approach to to the problem. I think this worked in a roundabout way. But he made four thousand dollars. So the problem was the signal that came back was not the signal I was expecting.
Well, a couple of things there, right One is first, I think you're embodying a lot of this or of collaborative troubleshooting approach. Right one, you gave him some money. Right you were like, I see you as agentive, I respect you. I'm going to give you this money to do it right. Like, that's maybe the most kind of agentive thing you could do, is like give him money to kind of do this right. So I think that that's already in the motive. You're not telling him what
to do, You're kind of letting him try it himself. Second, you hook him up with these other sports betting folks. Like, not only were you not like I'm going to tell you how to do this, You're like, hey, you are a collaborator who is as respected and kind of as high status as these other interesting sports bet guys. Go have a conversation and talk to them. And I bet in the context of that conversation he probably learned some stuff.
You know, at the very least, he probably learned that the bets he was making before weren't the greatest bets, right, I mean, if only because he started, either he had like a three sigma like kind of you know, lucky streak that like got in this four thousand bucks, or he learned something about you know, appropriate kinds of sports betting, or ways to kind of hedge things or think differently, right,
or some combination of both. But the point is that my guess is that you agentively allowing him with respect to talk to these high status people made him listen to those high status people's advice, right. He kind of had a choice of who to talk to. It wasn't like forced upon him. He probably got some reasonable advice.
And my guess is that those folks, even though they're kind of good at it, probably shared with him some of the downsides, you know, some of their own downsides from dealing with this stuff, and I think that can be kind of powerful. So I think, you know, maybe like to some sigma lucky breaks now was standing across you know, his money. My guess is he learned something.
And I bet if you surveyed him, he'd be more skeptical about the whole practice of sports betting, and at least a little bit more mature about going into it.
The initial survey was interesting that I asked him, after whatever six weeks, what's the next bet, because he'd been betting frantically and he said, I'm done. And I he said, I'm up four thousand dollars and this is stupid. They're going to take my money if I keep doing it. That my bets I just got. He basically said, we just got lucky, got really lucky. And they've made me aware of just how dumb these bets are.
That's so huge, right because if you had told him, if you had told him, like, these bets are dumb, like, don't do it, he would have just ignored you right or thought you were. But like that experience kind of got him to do it. I mean, I think this is, you know, not just for a conversation about sports betting, for a broader conversation about parenting. Is that why parenting is hard is that we want our kids to learn, but the way we learn as humans is through our
own mistakes and reaping the consequences of those mistakes. And that sucks as a parent because you don't want your kid to reap negative consequences. You don't want them to get physically, her, financially, her, emotionally, her experience just like the sting of failure that sucks for us as parents, and we don't like letting our kids experience that. But ultimately, like that is the way that they're going to learn.
They don't learn we just as humans, don't learn as well by being told stuff or forced to do stuff or strong armed into stuff. We learn by experiencing our own consequences, kind of troubleshooting things for ourselves, sometimes messing up and then learning better strategies. And what you did in the situation with your son is you like let him do that, you know, and you know to the two to five thousand bucks and maybe like some.
But he didn't. But he didn't, he didn't make the naked eye, he didn't make mistakes.
But if he's walking away saying I'm done, he's learned something that he had not learned when he was making these bets all over them. Yes, right, And that might be a thing a conversation to have, Like you know you're saying you're done, I'm just curious, like you know, what was the biggest thing you learned? Like I'm sure you you did this so successfully, right, Like I thought you were going to crash in burbas. Somehow you get this money, whether you're lucky or not. You know what
did you learn? Tell me?
Right?
Like give him this sort of idea of like agent of respect when you have that conversation, right to assume that you're going to learn something from him. And that is when we allow our teens to have the most insight.
My second strategy, so I was going to resort to if he didn't learn from the first strategy, was to offer to be the bookie and say, all right, you see this this bet on fandula draftings you and all your friends. I'll take every side of every bet you want to make. Just how And I think that that is such a good bet to have that I will be on the other side of all your bets going forward. And I don't know how it was a form of ridicule,
not directly to my son, but to the audience. This kind of mocking, a little bit of mocking tone may not be the worst way to go about it. Uh create an environment in which people feel a little foolish doing this.
Yeah, I think making people aware of the consequences of it right, you know, getting in on there like but but again, you know, how much do you learn when other people experience shodden flord on your behalf right or at your expense?
I learned a lot. I learned who I want to hang with and who I don't. But it's funny. Yeah, no, it's that this is this is an interesting question.
Yeah. I think strategy number one probably worked better than you thought, and it was much more consistent with the social science research on teenage motivation than you might have expected.
Strategy number two is going to be a hail Mary, all right, this was this was.
This was great, awesome, Thanks so much.
Lori Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale and host of the Happiness Lab here at Pushkin. Check it out. It's a really great listen and full of useful science that you can use to make your life actually better. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Lydia gene Kott, Catherine Gerardeau, and Ariella Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Sarah Bruguer. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.
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