Bingo and uncertainty

Last night, we played bingo.  In a room of 50 or so quite senior seniors, the visiting little grandson stood out.  He was excited to be able to sit at a table between his grandmother and his mother and have a card of his own.  He could see that he understood how to play and he began playing with high enthusiasm.  Exuberantly, he cried out,"I'm going to win!"  He wasn't trying to show off, he was just in very high spirits with the intoxicating certainty that victory was his.  He didn't win but he exclaimed that he would win on the next game.  His cheerful delight at the prospect of a win that would soon be his continued on for maybe 6 games.  Then, suddenly, he began to bawl loudly.  He had reached total dejection.  Where was that delicious victory that he could almost taste?  Something was badly, badly wrong.

I was reminded of several instances when my own great-grandson played games at an early age and was also deeply hurt at fate, the world and anyone in his vicinity for conspiring to keep the rightful winner, him of course, from victory.  It took maybe two or three years of opportunities to compete and lose before he developed a feeling that playing without winning wasn't so bad.

David DiSalvo in "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite" writes nicely about our mental desire for certainty, our automatic desire to end uncertainty,  Wray Herbert in "On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hardwired Habits" (and author of the preface of DiSalvo's book) emphasizes "scripts", "stereotypes", and "heuristics", habits of thought and decision that human minds grow and use all on their own.  

One of these habits is to lessen or eliminate uncertainty.  Daniel Gilbert in his excellently written "Stumbling on Happiness" reports that people have much lower enthusiasm for watching a football game tape than for watching a live game.

Why isn't it fun to watch a videotape of last night's football game even when we don't know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts! Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situations.

Gilbert, Daniel (2006-05-02). Stumbling on Happiness (Kindle Locations 470-475). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

As he makes very clear with humor and sympathy, we postulate what will happen when we don't know and our inclination is to postulate something good.  Increasingly, it is being recognized that doing so may not be good prediction but it is healthy and fun and that's what we do.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety