The notion of winning, as presented in this Newsweek piece:
Defined that way, winning becomes translatable into areas beyond the physical: chess, spelling bees, the corporate world, even combat. You can’t go forever down that road, of course. The breadth of our colloquial definition for winning—the fact that we use the same word for being handed an Oscar as for successfully prosecuting a war—means that there is no single gene for victory across all fields, no cerebral on-off switch that turns also-rans into champions. But neuroscientists, psychologists, and other researchers are beginning to better understand the highly interdisciplinary concept of winning, finding surprising links between brain chemistry, social theory, and even economics, which together give new insight into why some people come out on top again and again.
What’s better than winning? Doing it while someone else loses. An economist at the University of Bonn has shown that test subjects who receive a given reward for a task enjoy it significantly more if other subjects fail or do worse—a finding that upends traditional economic theories that absolute reward is a person’s central motivation. It’s one of several new inroads into the social dynamics of winning yielded by neuroeconomics, a trendy new field that mixes elements of neuroscience, economics, and cognitive psychology to determine why people make the choices they do—even, or especially, the irrational ones.
Also, the case study revolving around Agassi in the piece is interesting… Why do Americans love a winner? The last sentence provides the stimulating answer.
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