Cross Country
Analyzing my sport
Analyzation
- Cross country is a group sport which means there is a lot of group think and conformity. The conformity comes from when people change their views to match the majority of a group. For example: one day when we are deciding where to run some people might want to run on the trails but if the majority of people want to run somewhere else than those people will change their minds from running on the trails to running somewhere else. Asch's conformity experiment proves that conformity is real and really happens
- A group think situation would be when we finish running and we're deciding to stretch or not. Some people might think it's important and want to stretch but if someone else says "no let's not stretch it's annoying and not important" than everyone else might go along with it because they don't want to speak up.
- Group polarization also deals with cross country. For example, if we are running against another school and a couple people on our team don't like that school, they might spread that around and then suddenly everyone on the team hates that school. Since everyone hates them, we might trash their course/trail when we run on it and people might trip their runners so that they won't win.
- Cross country also has a lot to do with authority. We have a coach and captains for the boys and girls teams and everyone is expected to obey them. Our coach is the one in charge of the whole team but the girls and boys team captains are also in charge of the teams. Zimbardo's prison experiment was to research authority and obedience to authority. The kids on our team are expected to have obedience and listen to authority. Milgram's experiment also relates to the cross country team. The participants were expected to obey authority and so are the runners on our team.
- Fundamental attribution error relates to the cross country team also. For example, if someone runs a race and does very badly, they might blame the coach and the trail or the weather for causing them to run badly. They wouldn't think to blame themselves even if they skipped practice or didn't correctly train.
- Self-serving bias is also a part of running on the cross country team. For example, if someone has a really good race and gets a new personal record, they might attribute it to their own skill and that they're really fast. But when they get a bad time, they would attribute it to the weather or that the trail had lots of hills.