cratered, and the interceptor went on running. But his stride was disrupted, and within two paces he fell -- about two yards short of a touchdown.
I prefer to think that our team was inspired by this event, that we stopped the opponents’ advance just short of a touchdown, and that we recovered the ball and drove for the winning touchdown. Indeed, I do vaguely remember that happening, but I am not certain. I remember that the halfback went on to become an All Star. Of this I am certain: I could read the man’s thoughts, those thoughts were “No, damn it, I refuse to accept that,” and willpower and a light tap at exactly the right moment made an unforgettable difference. ***
The game that affected me most I never saw. I read about it in a social anthropology journal article 27 years ago. The paper, called ‘They saw a game,’ concerned a game between Harvard and perhaps Yale or Dartmouth. The authors, whose names I don’t remember, interviewed fans of both teams as they left the game.
Everyone agreed that the game was exceedingly dirty, and the record of the referees’ called fouls proves that assertion. Beyond that consensus, however, it was clear that fans of the two teams saw two different games. Each group of fans saw the rival team make an incredibly large number of fouls, many of which the referees ‘missed’. They saw their own team commit very few fouls, and yet the referees falsely accused their team of many other fouls. Each group was outraged at the bias of the referees and at the behavior of the other team.
The authors’ conclusion was inescapable and, to a budding scientist imbued with the myth of scientific objectivity, devastating: expectations exert a profound control on perceptions. Not invariably, but more frequently than we admit, we see what we expect to see, and we remember what we want to remember.
Twenty-three years later, I found and reread the paper to determine how accurate this personally powerful ‘memory’ was. I have refrained from editing the memory above. Here, then, are the ‘actual’ data and conclusions, or at least my current interpretation of them.
In a paper called ‘They saw a game: a case study,’ Hastorf and Cantril [1954] analyzed perceptions of a game between Dartmouth and Princeton. It was a rough game, with many penalties, and it aroused a furor of editorials in the campus newspapers and elsewhere, particularly because the Princeton star, in this, his last game for Princeton, had been injured and was unable to complete the game. One week after the game, Hastorf and Cantril had Dartmouth and Princeton psychology students fill out a questionnaire, and the authors analyzed the answers of those who had seen either the game or a movie of the game. They had two other groups view a film of the game and tabulate the number of infractions seen.
The Dartmouth and Princeton students gave discrepant responses. Almost no one said that Princeton started the rough play; 36% of the Dartmouth students and 86% of the Princeton students said that Dartmouth started it; and 53% of the Dartmouth students and 11% of the Princeton students said that both started it. But most significantly, out of the group who watched the film, the Princeton students saw twice as many Dartmouth infractions as the Dartmouth students did.
Hastorf and Cantril interpreted these results as indicating that, when encountering a mix of occurrences as complex as a football game, we experience primarily those events that fulfill a familiar pattern and have personal significance.
Hastorf and Cantril [1954] conclude: “In brief, the data here indicate that there is no such ‘thing’ as a ‘game’ existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’”
