“My team is the best and it’s going to win.” It’s quasi-religious.

Why don’t we all support the team that is statistically the best? Why do we cling so much to the team we choose? If we all thought like rational beings, these questions might not exist. Reality is a bit different. Considering the Olympics that are just beginning, football season, and all the games of all the sports that exist that we have yet to see until we are physically and emotionally exhausted, I will explain why we are not rational when it comes to choosing and supporting a team.

The theory of rational choice has as its main premise the maximization of utility as the basis for decision-making. In other words, we always choose what will give us more benefits than losses. On the other hand, behavioral economics explains that we are not as rational as neoclassical economics suggests, and that our decisions are usually influenced by our experiences, limitations, and biases.

If we follow rational choice theory, we would all support one, two, or three teams that have been identified as the best by statistics; the decision of which team to prefer should not be influenced by whether it is the team from our country, city, continent, or the country where our parents are from or where we went on vacation. However, behavioral economics has shown that people assign a higher price (value) to things that belong to them (such as nationality) than to things that do not belong to them.

In fact, choosing a team is not something we do consciously. It is usually assigned to us by our family, friends, an experience we had the first time we saw a game of that sport, and often by our nationality. Therefore, we already have something that belongs to us, that is ours and is deeply rooted.

The endowment effect explains that individuals assign a higher monetary value to things they own than to things they do not own; and to give them away or sell them to other people, we ask for a much higher price or value than they objectively have, simply because they are already ours. So, our team is worth more to us—it is better—than the other team; therefore, we “choose” to hold on to the team that is already ours, that belongs to us, rather than “lose” our team and sell it for another that is worth less to us and, in our opinion, has less chance of winning than ours, regardless of what the statistics say.

This feeling of belonging and ownership increases considerably when the team we support is our national team. The feeling of belonging is exponentially greater when it comes to our nationality; we don’t see it as something we belong to, but as a team that belongs to us. The endowment effect has a greater impact here, and we are unlikely to support a team other than our own country’s, even when the statistics objectively suggest otherwise.

Additionally, this effect we are explaining is also a consequence of our “loss aversion.” We don’t like to lose. But not only that, we tend to assign more value to losses than to equivalent gains; and therefore we want to avoid “losing” something more than we want to “gain” something of equivalent value. In other words, we prefer to give up winning when there is a chance of losing. We stick with our chosen team because we are afraid of possibly losing with another, even when winning with our own is not guaranteed.

That, in my opinion, is one explanation for our irrational loyalty to a team.

But there’s more!

Why do we believe so strongly, to the point of arguing with other people, that our team—and not the one ranked as one of the best—will win? This is explained by the availability heuristic.

First, heuristics are mental shortcuts we take to solve problems quickly and make decisions in a simplified way, thereby reducing the costs associated with information processing, which allows our minds to operate in such a complex world. The availability heuristic modulates our decision-making based on the most prominent, memorable, or present events in our memory, so that when we make decisions, we incorrectly estimate probabilities.

If, in the game we saw in the preliminary round, our favorite team scored a goal or made an impressive play, that sticks in our memory more than the existing statistic that they have lost 5 of their last 7 games. And because of availability heuristics (incorrect estimation of probabilities) we believe that event, scoring that goal or playing an impressive game, will happen again and our team will win again.

The most famous example of the endowment effect comes from a series of experiments involving mugs. In this experiment, Kahneman and his colleagues gave each member of the first group of participants a mug and the members of the other group US$6.00 (the standard price of a mug). The members of the first group (“the sellers”) were asked what the minimum price would be that they would accept to give up their mug. The second group (“the buyers”) were asked what the maximum price would be that they would pay to acquire the mug. Both groups were told that the information provided would be used to calculate the equilibrium price of the mugs, and that the mugs would be reassigned and exchanged between the owners who preferred money to mugs at the market price and those who had money and preferred mugs to cash, at that price. Surprisingly, contrary to rational choice theory, sellers valued the mug at approximately twice the price that buyers valued it, and very few exchanges took place, even after multiple variations of the experiment were conducted to allow participants to learn from experience.

So, with that misjudged probability, we feel able to defend our team to such extremes as making bets that we will probably then have to negotiate not to pay.