Rooting against - critical summary review

There's a specific, sordid pleasure in football. Watching the rival national team, the powerful and unlikable one, fall to a team with no pedigree, an underdog "nobody" believed in, brings a joy too big for the chest, and sometimes we have to let it out in posts and loud laughter. It's the victory of someone who never played. And there's the flip side of that pleasure, the irritation of having someone on your own side who should be cheering with you and still picks the other camp, sour, sometimes with a faintly villainous smile, just to be contrary.

Let's back up a little and travel first through the improbable friendships between nations. Football makes strange alliances. In 2018, when South Korea beat Germany 2-0 and knocked out the champions, the ones who truly celebrated were the Mexicans, still alive in the World Cup thanks to the result. Thousands of them marched to the Korean embassy, carried the consul on their shoulders and hailed him as a brother. "Coreano, hermano, ya eres mexicano." The friendship between the two fan bases lives on.

There are even more improbable bonds, written in blood and in constitutions. In 1802, Napoleon sent roughly 5,000 Polish soldiers to Haiti to crush the revolt of the enslaved. Many of them, realizing they were putting down a fight for freedom much like the one they waged at home, switched sides and fought alongside the Haitians against France. Haiti's 1805 constitution granted those Poles citizenship, and a community of their descendants still lives there today, centered in Cazale. More than two centuries later, Haiti has not forgotten, and it carries Poland on its jersey.

Rooting against is bigger than football, and older. The question almost no one asks is whether that wish to see things go wrong has a reason behind it. When it does, it serves a useful purpose. When it doesn't, it charges a price that rarely gets counted.

the pleasure is real, in other people's failures

There's even a word for it. Schadenfreude, from German, names the joy or satisfaction of watching someone else's misfortune, failure or downfall.

The relief of seeing someone stumble is neither a rare anomaly nor a character flaw. It lights up the same brain regions that respond to money and food. The ventral striatum, the brain's main reward center, activates during episodes of schadenfreude, much the way it does for eating chocolate or winning money.

The most famous experiment on this came out of Princeton, with die-hard Yankees and Red Sox fans inside an MRI machine. When the rival team failed, even against a neutral third team, with no direct benefit to the fan's own club, the ventral striatum lit up. And the grim finding drawn from it was this: that same activity correlated with a stated willingness to harm the rival team's fans. The pleasure of seeing someone fall and the urge to push them live in the same neighborhood.

There's one ingredient that sets the tone for all of it. Envy and schadenfreude travel together: the stronger the envy felt beforehand, the more intense the pleasure when the envied person stumbles. That's where the coin starts to show its two faces.

the face with a reason: when rooting against protects someone

There's a kind of rooting against that holds shared life together. The ultimatum game is one of the most replicated experiments in behavioral economics. One person receives a sum and proposes how to split it with another. If the other refuses, no one gets anything. Logic says take any crumb, after all, half a loaf is better than none, right? Something beats nothing. People, however, reject unfair offers even at a cost to themselves, defying the pure self-interest hypothesis. They would rather lose than let the insult stand. This rooting against has an address and a reason: it punishes whoever breaks the rule and, in punishing, keeps the rule standing for everyone.

The same machinery shows up in intellectual work. The term groupthink was coined by Irving Janis to describe groups that decide badly because no one wants to disagree. The classic antidote is to institutionalize the person who roots against the majority's idea. Charlan Nemeth's research shows that appointing a devil's advocate can increase the consideration of alternatives by 61 percent. And this is not academic fluff: Amy Edmondson's work at Harvard shows consistently that teams that prize harmony over honest debate make worse decisions. Here rooting against becomes criticism, and criticism is what stays the hand of those with too much power and too little pushback.

In both scenes, the person rooting against doesn't want the other to suffer for suffering's sake. They want justice, or truth, or a better decision. The target is the error, not the other person's happiness. Complicated, right?

the face with no reason: envy, spite and cutting the poppy

The other face appears in a version of the ultimatum game that separates the wheat from the chaff. Certain participants reject unequal offers not out of fairness but to reduce the other's gain, willing to destroy the whole prize just so no one ends up above them. Researchers call this competitive spite. The spiteful person prefers a zero-to-zero outcome to one where they land below their partner. Better everyone loses than watch the other win.

Those who feel this most strongly tend to fit a profile already mapped out. People scoring higher in narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy report stronger and more constant pleasure at others' failures. It's a tendency, not a diagnosis. And there's a silent cost: frequent, intense schadenfreude correlates with lower-quality relationships and less prosocial behavior.

On a collective level, this poison even has a garden name. Tall poppy syndrome describes the habit of cutting down whoever grows too tall, so the person shrinks back to everyone else's size. The largest study on the subject, led by Rumeet Billan, surveyed more than 4,700 women across 103 countries. The result: nearly 90 percent reported having their own achievements attacked or diminished at work. The phrase comes from an old image, of a Roman tyrant who lopped the heads off the tallest poppies in the garden to show his son what to do with anyone who stands out.

how to know which side of the coin you're on

The test works for the match, the concert and the coworker's promotion: the question is what you actually want. Wanting the other to be corrected, challenged or held accountable is rooting against an error, and that has value. Wanting only for the other to fall, with nothing good coming of the fall, is spite's territory, and the only guaranteed casualty is the one who feels it.

The tells give it away. Whoever roots against out of envy moves the goalposts: if the artist gets it right, the credit becomes luck; if wrong, it becomes proof. They prefer a tie at the bottom to someone else's win, even when that win takes nothing from them. And there's the part that corrodes from within. The dopamine of laughing at someone who's suffering can be addictive, as with those who make gossip and the little dig a habit, and over time the rational part of the brain tends to yield ground to the more primitive emotions. Rooting against with no reason trains the person who practices it to like it more and more.

what to do with this information

Anyone leading a team can treat the devil's advocate as the productive version of rooting against. Institutionalizing dissent in decisions, with roles that rotate, keeps criticism from turning into personal grudge. And it's worth watching for competitive spite: when someone would rather sink the project than see a colleague shine, the cost is the whole team's. Sound the alarm.

Anyone following public debate can use the distinction as a filter for the news and the feeds. Separate those who root against the abuse of power, with reason, from those who root against happiness, which is another thing entirely. The first sustains public life. The second only poisons it. But that only reveals itself with analysis, patience and spotting the patterns around the issue.

And on a personal level, waiting for someone else to trip now and then is no sign that anything is wrong with anyone. It's an old circuit, a common one, and only louder when envy comes first. Noticing the envy behind the rooting already drains most of its force, and in the end it does no harm in the overwhelming majority of cases.

The coin has two faces and a single edge. Rooting against error, injustice and abuse is what keeps the world from becoming a chorus of agreement. Rooting against another's success, beauty and joy is a borrowed pleasure, drawn from someone else's account, that always defeats the one who feels it. The difference lies not in the intensity of the feeling but in the answer to one question: if the other falls, does anyone besides the one rooting gain anything? When the answer is yes, root away. When it's no, the responsibility is each person's own. So when you see someone rooting against your team, remember the other side is human too, it lives, it feels, it celebrates, and so there's nothing wrong with that at all.