Thanks, I’ve edited the post to take account of some of these criticisms.
(1) If we know we won’t actually have to do anything, supporting the weaker party is a cheap signal of strength. Only the strong would back a loser. (Maybe this supports your account, by giving a reason to signal “niceness”?)
People want to signal that they are both nice and strong. The edited post explains why we want to signal that we are nice.
(2) If we know we don’t actually have to get involved, we just go with whoever we actually have the most sympathy for. (This is like your “niceness” explanation, but sans signaling.) Two versions:
I don’t like this as much; rather than using evolutionary theory, it attributes the effect to something happening pretty much at random, i.e. there is no survival advantage to sympathizing or to just randomly supporting weak parties. But evolution is not a perfect optimizer, so this could be true. If this explanation were true, we would expect some racially and/or culturally distinct groups to support the stronger party. If this trait is universal in humans, it could be a fixed neutral mutation, but that would strike me as suspicious.
Lastly, I’ll admit that I am more sure that I have explained why the results don’t contradict each other than why they are the way they are. I would not be that surprised if Yvain’s post had lied about the underdog bias.
Thanks, I’ve edited the post to take account of some of these criticisms.
People want to signal that they are both nice and strong. The edited post explains why we want to signal that we are nice.
I don’t like this as much; rather than using evolutionary theory, it attributes the effect to something happening pretty much at random, i.e. there is no survival advantage to sympathizing or to just randomly supporting weak parties. But evolution is not a perfect optimizer, so this could be true. If this explanation were true, we would expect some racially and/or culturally distinct groups to support the stronger party. If this trait is universal in humans, it could be a fixed neutral mutation, but that would strike me as suspicious.
Lastly, I’ll admit that I am more sure that I have explained why the results don’t contradict each other than why they are the way they are. I would not be that surprised if Yvain’s post had lied about the underdog bias.