The biology of risk
That was the title of a fascinating opinion piece by John Coates from back in early June in the NYTimes.
Most of us tend to believe that stress is largely a psychological phenomenon, a state of being upset because something nasty has happened. But if you want to understand stress you must disabuse yourself of that view. The stress response is largely physical: It is your body priming itself for impending movement.
As such, most stress is not, well, stressful. For example, when you walk to the coffee room at work, your muscles need fuel, so the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol recruit glucose from your liver and muscles; you need oxygen to burn this fuel, so your breathing increases ever so slightly; and you need to deliver this fuel and oxygen to cells throughout your body, so your heart gently speeds up and blood pressure increases. This suite of physical reactions forms the core of the stress response, and, as you can see, there is nothing nasty about it at all.
Far from it. Many forms of stress, like playing sports, trading the markets, even watching an action movie, are highly enjoyable. In moderate amounts, we get a rush from stress, we thrive on risk taking. In fact, the stress response is such a healthy part of our lives that we should stop calling it stress at all and call it, say, the challenge response.
Coates notes that the challenge response in humans is particularly sensitive to uncertainty and novelty, causing an elevation in cortisol which reduces our appetite for risk.
Based on that thesis, Coates argues that in reducing uncertainty about upcoming interest rate movies, Greenspan and Bernanke have actually “one of the most powerful brakes on excessive risk taking in stocks was released,” leading to much greater stock market volatility and more dramatic stock market booms and busts.
It may seem counterintuitive to use uncertainty to quell volatility. But a small amount of uncertainty surrounding short-term interest rates may act much like a vaccine immunizing the stock market against bubbles. More generally, if we view humans as embodied brains instead of disembodied minds, we can see that the risk-taking pathologies found in traders also lead chief executives, trial lawyers, oil executives and others to swing from excessive and ill-conceived risks to petrified risk aversion. It will also teach us to manage these risk takers, much as sport physiologists manage athletes, to stabilize their risk taking and to lower stress.
I watched more soccer (I'd use football but most posts tagged football in my blog will be about the American rendition, so for disambiguation I'm going to use what soccer fans would consider the profane nomenclature) than I have in my entire life up until now this summer because of the World Cup. People put on the game in the office, and everywhere I went it seemed some American TV was dialed to a game.
[This is a topic for another post, but I am curious about what drove this noticeable uptick in interest in soccer in the U.S. this summer. Was it the greater build out of social media? The success of the U.S. team? Increased coverage on ESPN? The fact that games were in the U.S. timezone this time, unlike the next World Cup or this past Winter Olympics? The rise of MLS? All or none of the above?]
While I'm far from a soccer expert, I did detect a noticeable tightening of game play in overtime. This could purely be because of fatigue, but it led to a less interesting form of play in those periods.
Coates' theory of the relationship between risk-taking and uncertainty reminded me of one of my pet peeves about many sports: the many mental traps that reduce risk-taking in athletes and coaches. From a sports design perspective, I'd argue that fans would prefer greater daring from players and teams more often. Volatility, with dramatic boom and busts, may be not be desirable when it comes to your finances, but in sports and entertainment it's the building block for more compelling drama.
It's not just soccer. The reluctance of football coaches to go for it on fourth down more often is another example where reduced risk lowers entertainment value. The irony is that mathematically, what feels like riskier behavior may be the more rational play. The math supports going for it on fourth down most if not all the time. In soccer, ending overtime deadlocked leads to the randomness of penalty kicks. I'm not conversant on the statistics around soccer, but leaving your fate to penalty kicks feels less certain than just trying to win in overtime.
If the players and coaches won't behave rationally, however, they can have their hands forced by rule changes. What if the NFL just banned punting? Everyone would go for it on fourth down, and I'm confident that would be a more exciting game. What if soccer's overtime were sudden death?
My ideal sports design guiding philosophy: maximize entropy but still reward skilled play. That is, you can let the rough at the U.S. Open grow wild so golfers have to try to stay in the fairways or risk having to hack their way out of the weeds. You can shorten the first round 7 game series in the NBA to 5 games to give the underdog a greater chance.
Don't design a game so skill-based that the outcome is never in doubt. There's a reason why people don't watch televised checkers. But also don't design a game so random that every contestant has an equal chance of winning regardless of skill. You might as well watch two teams flip a coin.