No one likes the feeling of being left out. It is a simple fact of life that we all know to be true. There aren’t too many worse feelings than knowing that your friends are having a party and you aren’t coming to it.
According to the latest studies and experiments in neuroscience, our brains react with anger or sadness when we are being threatened with exclusion.
Dr. Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psychological and brain science at the University of Massachusetts, described in a blog post research on how people react when playing a game called “Cyberball.” Cyberball is a video game where players pass a ball among a group of friends. In this experiment, however, the player being studied begin to realize that the other players aren’t passing the player the ball.
“Our brains, then, react with anger or sadness when we’re being threatened with exclusion, even if the exclusion is from strangers, and even if it is in a virtual world. If such a minor manipulation can produce such a brain meltdown, it’s not a far stretch to see how badly we react to ostracism and rejection when the culprits are people we know,” Whitbourne writes.
I believe this phenomenon of the dread of being left out has played a big role in why so many college football conferences committees and local high school school boards have decided over recent weeks to let their students play football.
On Tuesday, the Greenville Public School District decided in a 4-1 vote to reinstate all fall and winter sports. Then, on Thursday evening, the commissioners of the PAC-12 decided that they would begin their football seasons in November, making them the final Power 5 school to say they are playing football this fall.
Two weeks ago the Hollandale School Board decided to restart football, and Simmons head football coach Jeremy Packer summed it up best when he described how his players felt about not being allowed to play.
“My players were looking around at just about everyone else playing football, and they were asking, ‘Why aren’t we allowed to play?’” Packer said.
I am certainly not discounting the fact the college administrators and local school boards had new medical information about COVID-19 when they decided to restart football. But, it is hard to believe these recent 180 decisions are due only to their updated information when many of the basic facts on the virus remain similar.
Even though these decision makers were not actually playing football themselves, students and coaches they knew were being put on the sidelines due to decisions they made. And, that may be an even bigger burden to carry then being excluded yourself.
David W. Healy is the sports editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. He can be reached at dhealy@ddtonline.com.
