The Stories of Your Life, page 13
Mirror images? Absolutely. Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero are mirrored by Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max; Coca-Cola Cherry by Pepsi Wild Cherry; Fanta, Sprite, Powerade and Monster by Crush/Tango, Starry/7-Up, Gatorade and Rockstar. But it’s not just mere equivalence. Again, like Iceman and Maverick, the rivals have mirroring brand identities. Coke is traditional, family friendly, authentic (‘The real thing’), even conservative. Pepsi is brash, irreverent, young (‘The choice of a new generation’), even anti-establishment. The Michael Jackson advert that launched the new-generation slogan was quite radical for its time (1984) in featuring an almost all-black cast.
Feud taking on a life of its own? To the (Pepsi) max! This is particularly true for consumers who, remember, can’t tell the difference between the two companies’ flagship beverages in a blind test. In fact, the 2004 Neuron study went even further in demonstrating that what it rather snootily calls our ‘Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks’ (translation: ‘which cola you like’) is really all in the mind. As well as just asking participants which drink they preferred and conducting the standard blind taste test, the experimenters hooked participants up to an fMRI brain scanner, before conducting a taste test with a twist. The participants – unbeknown to them – actually got Coke every time, but sometimes served in a Coke-branded cup, sometimes a plain, unbranded cup. In terms of both what participants said they preferred, and what their brain scans said they actually preferred, the Coke tasted better when it was given in the branded rather than unbranded cup. Fascinatingly, the same was not true for Pepsi, which tasted just as good in an unbranded as branded cup. These findings show that the Coke-vs-Pepsi rivalry has taken on a life of its own which has absolutely nothing to do with the relative merits of the stuff in the can, and absolutely everything to do with the branding around it. But it’s also true for the companies themselves. Pepsi’s 2019 Super Bowl billboard campaign said nothing about the merits of its product; it trolled Coke all over Atlanta for sheer banter. The same is true for Pepsi’s 2020 Halloween ad showing a can of Pepsi in a red ‘Cola Coca’ cape (gotta watch out for those trademark lawyers!) with the line ‘We wish you a scary Halloween!’
What about the final ingredient of reconciliation and redemption: will Coke and Pepsi ever put aside their differences to fight a common enemy? We’re halfway there. Forty years ago, the adverts were brutal. ‘Coca Cola says it’s the real thing’ sneers a Pepsi advert from 1982, showing a close-up of a Coke can, before introducing the Pepsi challenge, the conclusion of which is flashed onscreen: ‘Nationwide more people prefer the taste of Pepsi over Coca-Cola’. These days, Pepsi’s ribbing of Coca-Cola is just good-natured banter, with no attempt to convince drinkers that its offering is actually superior. And how did Coke respond to the Super Bowl trolling? With nothing but magnanimity: ‘We’re thrilled to help our city welcome everyone to town for the Big Game, including our friends from Pepsi’.
Partly, this is just good marketing. Counter to what most people have long believed, a 1999 review and meta-analysis – albeit one conducted in the domain of political adverts – found that so-called negative advertising – attacking a rival – is not particularly effective.6 Neither would it seem wise to feature a rival’s product, and even its slogan, as prominently as in Pepsi’s ‘Coca-Cola says it’s the real thing’ ad.
Partly, somewhat more sinister motives seem to be at play. Around the world, more than thirty different jurisdictions, including the UK and some parts of California, already levy additional taxes on drinks with high sugar content.7 Yes! To Affordable Groceries, which describes itself as ‘a group of citizens, businesses and community organizations’, campaigns against these kinds of taxes. But, surprise, surprise, historically its biggest funders have been Coca Cola ($3.8 million in 2018) and Pepsi ($2.8 million), with Dr Pepper (around $1 million) and Red Bull ($100,000) also on board.8 That’s right, in classic Feud style, just like Anna and Elsa, the long-time rivals have teamed up to fight an even greater foe: legislation that threatens their profit margins.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE STORY
Perhaps more so than for any other masterplot, the seeds of Feud have already taken deep root within us by childhood. In fact, they may even have been planted before birth; hardwired into our DNA.
In 1970, the British psychologist Henry Tajfel published a landmark study designed to investigate the roots of conflict between groups.9 Tajfel starts his paper by discussing the hostility shown towards Bosnians in parts of what was then Yugoslavia (which boiled over into war in the 1990s), and towards immigrants to the UK from the West Indies, Pakistan and India (Tajfel himself was an immigrant, originally from Poland). He discusses racial conflict in the US, religious conflict in Northern Ireland and – somewhat bizarrely to modern ears – linguistic national conflict in Belgium. Tajfel’s theory was that while these conflicts might on the surface seem to be about race, or religion, or language, in fact they are not really about anything at all. Rather, whenever two or more groups emerge – however they happen to be defined – conflict between them is almost inevitable. Tajfel didn’t frame his theory in terms of narrative per se, but it is clearly built around what we have identified above as a key ingredient of the Feud masterplot: the fact that the feud seems to take on a life of its own, above and beyond whatever the original disagreement was about.
To put his theory to the test, Tajfel recruited a group of Bristol schoolchildren and split them into two groups on the basis of the most trivial thing he could think of. He showed them slides of abstract paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and assigned them to groups on the basis of which they preferred. That’s all. He didn’t – as in the now largely debunked ‘Robber’s Cave’ experiment from the 1950s – send the boys off to camp in the woods and engineer conflicts between them.10 He didn’t need to. The mere fact of creating two arbitrary groups was enough.
In the main part of the experiment, the boys were given the task of allocating points to one another; points that could be translated into money afterwards.* Ostensibly, the points were a reward for some trivial dot-counting task, but this was just a cover story. What Tajfel was really interested in was how they allocated the points. Each boy was given the task of awarding points to two other boys: one from his own group; one from the opposite group. That is, a boy on Team Klee would be asked to award points to another boy from Team Klee, and to a boy from Team Kandinsky. The awardees were anonymous; the boy giving out the points didn’t know anything about them, other than their preferences in abstract art. Crucially, the boys couldn’t just give out the points willy-nilly – on each run, they had to choose from a set of options: (a) 8 points for your teammate, 7 points for the boy from the other team; (b) 9 points for your teammate, 14 points for the boy from the other team, and so on. So how did the boys dish out the points? What would you do?
One possible strategy is simply to maximize the total number of points that you give out, regardless of how they’re shared between your teammate and the boy from the other team. Needless to say, the boys didn’t choose that strategy; neither did they choose the strategy of sharing the points out as equally as possible. A third strategy is just to give as many points as possible to your teammate, and forget about the other guy. But the boys didn’t do that either. Instead, they reliably chose the spiteful strategy of maximizing the difference between the points given to the teammate and those given to the ‘opposing’ team member. That is, the boys were prepared to reduce the pay-out to their own teammates if, by doing so, they could reduce the pay-out to the other team even more. Like petty feuding neighbours, the boys would rather trample on next door’s roses than grow their own, all because the other guy happened to put his hand up for a different artist.
At least on the surface. Tajfel’s whole point, of course, was that this financial feuding was in fact nothing to do with modern art, and everything to do with spontaneously occurring rivalry between groups. Depressingly, a modern-day twist on Tajfel’s study suggests that this tendency is present even amongst fourteen-month-old babies.11 First, the babies in the study were invited to select a snack from a bowl: either a green bean or a Graham cracker (I don’t know either – ask an American). The babies were then introduced to two rabbit puppets. The first identified themselves as ‘similar’ to the child. For example, if the child chose a Graham cracker, the puppet said, ‘Mmm, yum! I like Graham crackers’, and ‘Ew, yuck! I don’t like green beans’ (or vice-versa if the child chose a green bean). The second rabbit puppet identified themselves as ‘different’ to the child, claiming to dislike the food that the baby had picked and to like the other.
In the test phase, these two rabbits each played with a ball. But then – oh no, disaster – they lost control of the ball, and it rolled away to the other side of the screen, where one of two dog puppets was waiting. On some test runs, the waiting dog was a ‘helper’ dog, who took the ball back to the rabbit who had lost it. On other test runs, the waiting dog was a ‘harmer’ dog, who looked different to the helper dog, and who pinched the ball and ran off with it. Finally, the two dog puppets were set out on the table, and the infants were invited to choose one to play with. This was taken as a measure of which dog they liked best.
Did these fourteenth-month-olds choose the helper dog or the harmer dog? It depends. Remember how one rabbit was ‘similar’ to the child (in that they liked the same food) while the other one was ‘different’? Not that surprisingly, children preferred the dog who helped the rabbit that was ‘similar’ to them. But – in a rather sinister twist – these infants also preferred the dog who harmed the rabbit that was ‘different’ to them.
The unfortunate conclusion of the science, then, is that we don’t start out as egalitarian innocents, who are then corrupted by a cruel world. We are born with (or, at least, acquire in the first years and months of life) a preference for those who we see as similar to ourselves. We look favourably on those who help people ‘like us’ and who harm people ‘not like us’. In other words, Steinbeck was right: the Feud masterplot is indeed ‘the first book’, etched into our DNA.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
One particularly interesting aspect of the Feud masterplot is that it’s one that we’ve all experienced, perhaps more so than for any of the other plots in this book. In East of Eden, when a group of characters are debating the meaning of the Cain and Abel story, the servant Lee notes that ‘people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule – a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting – only the deeply personal and familiar’.
What Lee is getting at here is that we have all had that feeling of being somehow forced to compete with someone. If you have a sibling – and assuming that, unlike Cain, you haven’t murdered them – you’ll immediately recognize that feeling of being in competition for affection and attention. Indeed, this competition seems to be the reason for the longstanding finding that, on average, children’s IQ-test scores decrease, albeit only by a couple of points, for each position in the family. For example, on average the first-born child in a family has an IQ of around 103, the second-born 101 and the third-born 99.12 One of the reasons for this pattern is competition between siblings for their parents’ attention.13 A first-born child has a period – typically a year or two – in which they can have all of their parents’ attention to themselves. The second-born child always has to share their parents’ attention with a sibling; the third-born with two siblings, and so on. Sibling rivalry is not only a very real phenomenon, but one with measurable consequences.
As East of Eden’s Lee recognizes, though, the Cain and Abel story resonates with all of us; not just those of us who have siblings. At school, you no doubt competed with other children for the attention and praise of your teacher (and, even more viciously, for the friendship of other children). Perhaps you and a rival at work are competing right now for the attention and praise of your boss? Or perhaps, more seriously, you’re formally competing for promotion? And if, like most siblings, you’re at least sort-of friends, that probably makes it even worse? Or perhaps you had to compete with a love rival for the affections of your current partner? Or worse, perhaps your would-be partner chose someone else, or your former partner left you for someone else (which has a much more bitter sting than a partner leaving and becoming single)?
It’s not all bad news, though. Although our internalization of the Feud narrative can lead us into pointless and unnecessary conflicts (as any parent of siblings can observe on a daily basis), it is also responsible for a whole field of human endeavour that, for millions of people, is one of the major sources of meaning in life.
Sport is so pervasive that we rarely stop to notice just how bizarre it is. For literally millions of fully-grown adults all around the world, at regular intervals, the thing they care about most in the world – to the point that it moves them to screams of rage and tears of joy – is whether some people wearing red T-shirts kick the ball between some posts (or throw it in a hoop, or touch it on the ground) more often than some people wearing blue T-shirts. It makes sense only when you remember that all sports – but especially sports based on geographically identified teams – are nothing more than a safe way to gorge daily on real-world Feud narratives (a role formerly played by the much-less-safe outlet of war).
Don’t try and tell me it’s about appreciating exquisite skill or elite performance. That might be the icing on the cake, but it’s not what sport is about. If you were to offer a hundred football fans the choice between attending a charity exhibition match featuring Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo or a cup final between their team and their local rivals, not one would choose the former, no matter how dire the football served up by their own team. In fact, the more dire the football, the more intense the rivalry. These days, Manchester City probably care more about beating Real Madrid than Manchester United. But nothing could be more important to a Burnley fan than beating Blackburn; to a Wolves fan than beating West Brom; or to us Ipswich fans than beating Norwich.
Sporting feuds contain all of the key ingredients. The rivals must be evenly matched mirror images. Ipswich’s rivals are Norwich, not the geographically-much-closer Colchester, who we tend to have a soft spot for, albeit in a patronizing kind of way. Manchester United’s rivals are Manchester City, not Altrincham or Stockport County (and, indeed, in City’s wilderness years, United fans tended to focus more on their rivalry with Liverpool). Feud taking on a life of its own? Absolutely. Burnley versus Blackburn – probably the longest-running rivalry in professional sport – isn’t about cotton-weaving contracts in the 1800s, who won the FA Cup in the early 1900s, or even – with fans of both teams scattered throughout the north-west – about whether you live in Burnley or Blackburn. It’s about the rivalry itself, as they say in that part of the world, ‘end of’. Reconciliation and redemption opportunities are few and far between in professional sport, but rival fans are certainly capable of coming together to fight a bigger enemy when required, such as when fans of Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham, Arsenal and Liverpool united to successfully oppose a breakaway European Super League in 2021.
So perfect, in fact, is sports rivalry as a microcosm of this universal human condition that scientists have long used it as a testing ground for understanding the revenge and rivalry that characterizes the Feud.
The ‘ultimatum game’ isn’t much of a game, but it certainly features an ultimatum: ‘Take it or leave it’. The game, such as it is, is played between two opponents. The two are given a sum of money to split between them, but there is no negotiation. One of the players – chosen at random – is given the role of ‘Proposer’, and comes up with a suggested split. The other player, the ‘Responder’, has a simple choice: accept the offer, in which case the players receive the money as per the agreed-upon split, or reject it, in which case both players leave with nothing. The original point of the ultimatum game was to demonstrate that – contrary to what economists had long assumed – people are not purely ‘rational’ when it comes to financial matters. That is, they don’t set aside all other considerations and simply take whichever course of action leaves them better off in purely monetary terms; those other considerations matter too, and quite a bit.
Suppose that the amount to be split is $10, and the proposer offers a 90/10 split – $9 to herself, $1 to her opponent. The ‘rational’ course of action is to accept the offer, since a dollar is better than nothing. But I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that responders almost never accept this type of offer. Would you? Of course not. Almost everyone agrees that it’s worth ‘paying’ a dollar for the satisfaction of telling that greedy so-and-so where to get off. That said, everyone has a price. One group of researchers exploited the poverty of poor villagers in India to run a high-stakes ultimatum game in which the amount to be divided was the local equivalent of around $16,000 per pair (of course, the cost to the research project was far lower, since it was deliberately conducted in very low-wage communities).14 The typical proposal offered was around 90/10, presumably because the proposers guessed that few responders would turn down the equivalent of $1,600 just to spite them; and this is exactly how it turned out, with 23/24 proposals accepted (props to the single participant who did reject the offer!).
That’s the extreme version, though. In the ‘normal’ version, where participants are playing for $10 or so, proposers typically offer a split of around 75/25, an offer that around 75 per cent of responders accept. This makes the ultimatum game a great laboratory for studying Feud in the context of sports. The most notable study of this type, looking at US college football rivalries, was conducted by researchers at the University of Florida (Go Gators!), Wayne State (Go Warriors!), the University of Georgia (Go Bulldogs!) and the University of Illinois (Go, um, Fighting Illini!). Yes, yes, I know that to us Brits, the idea of college football rivalry sounds laughable, with the average university football match in the UK attended by the proverbial two men and a dog. But the US college system boasts ten stadiums with a greater capacity than Wembley’s 90,000.15 The record attendance for a college game – in which the Tennessee Volunteers beat the Virginia Tech Hokies in 2016 – was 157,000. US college football is a BIG deal.
