Loss aversion: The psychological inevitability of India’s loss in the World Cup final

Studies show that an area of the brain called the ventral striatum lights up at the expectation of reward but then diminishes at some point. Maybe it's evolutionary biology, that our aversion to a loss is more impactful than the prospect of gain from a win. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

India's crushing defeat at the hands of Australia in the finals of the 50-over World Cup has been viewed as a blasphemy and a heresy in the religio-patriotic history of the new Indian nationhood. Cricket, after all, has the charm and power of an ersatz religion and, in tandem with Bollywood glitz, sets the cultural agenda countrywide.

The 11 men who received the collective equivalent of the Adoration of the Magi till then, however swayed and eventually fell carrying the burden of expectations of 1.2 billion people baying for the blood of the opponents. Was it the nail biting, anxiety-driven adrenaline rush that stymied their long dedicated hours of practice or was it botched and bungled decision-making that stalled any stratagem?

What led a perfectly competent team to underperform when it mattered most?

Even as debates and theories spark on the internet about why the Indian team did not belt out aggressive boundaries and sixes as befitted the gala of the paisa vasool last match of the series, they did seem like a united brotherhood of safe play.

Some people have invoked theories of the Choke, that inevitable melting into a blue funk or plain old performance anxiety in the face of a challenge that manages to look like a tiger’s deathly attack. These are not unique panic-induced feelings but extremely common as we suddenly break out of the natural and easy flow state and try to overperform. Who has not had a panic attack when the freeze response takes over? Even fully primed and dopamine-addicted Wall Street sharks have bad days and in fact after a winning streak many traders are told to go home for the day because of a certain recklessness or a high set which makes them prone to make even more feckless trades.

It isn’t an abnormal development since the body enters a kind of shock state because of the important catecholamine adrenaline or the emergency hormone which makes one flee or freeze when confronted by real or perceived danger. As organisms with extraordinary ability to plan and go into twirls of imagination, we extrapolate a myriad possibilities and consequences onto a stimulus, forcing the epicentre of decision-making and learning, our unique prefrontal cortex, to get confusing signals. Stress, then, dramatically alters cognitive abilities in high performance tasks. This fear involves the amygdala, the high priestess of fear which simply shuts off the neural pathways to the prefrontal cortex, the organ for higher thinking.

However, in a surprising set of findings during dopamine-mediated reward studies of brain areas, it was found that an area called the ventral striatum lights up at the expectation of reward but then diminishes at some point. Here is where the pleasure principle bows to what we now call the prospect theory of loss aversion posited by the Nobel prize winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman. This dopamine-studded area of the brain simply does not respond to the pleasure of gain in the same initial spurt of dopamine because fear of loss is perceived more strongly by the brain.

Clearly loss aversion is a cognitive bias that propels us to explain to ourselves that avoiding a loss is of greater import than winning for survival. Maybe this is a corollary of our evolutionary biology where looking out for the negative or dangerous or loss is more important than any pleasure or a win. There is an asymmetric relationship between loss aversion and winning, with the pain of losing being twice that of gaining.

Which is why neuroscience researchers insist that the only way even for professionals is to leave a fraction of outcomes to chance, God or something uncontrollable.

In her 2010 book Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting it Right When You Have To, Sian Beilock, president of the New York-based Barnard College and professor of psychology examines the analysis paralysis that besets talented people, forcing them to fall flat on their faces at crucial moments. The implicit learning that is stored in our brains is almost an involuntarily performed skill practised over many times. Once you start thinking about the outcome of the game obsessively, this extra thinking diverts one’s energy and becomes noise. That is why the winning streak and losing streak are real.

The truism is not a fallacy but worth its weight in gold: the more you think of losing, the more you actually lose.