#195: “Social Contagion And Why I Am Not Going To Vegas”

Last week, researchers in Sweden published a paper on clapping, concluding that applause is a ‘social contagion’ and that the length of an ovation is influenced less by what is being observed or heard and more by how particular members of the crowd behave. The scientists found that it takes just one or two people to put their hands together for a ripple of applause to spread and that these claps spark a chain reaction, where, spurred on by the noise, other audience members join in. Lead author Dr. Richard Mann concluded that there is a “social pressure to start clapping, but once you’ve started there’s an equally strong social pressure not to stop, until someone initiates that stopping.”

There are many other aspects to our lives which are interpreted by anthropologists as social contagions. Yawning is one, though there is no ultimate agreement on its function. Laughter is another, the main purpose of which, it is believed, evolved out of alerting others in the social group to danger by a warning cry.  If you have a warning cry, you also need another signal to effectively ‘cancel that cry’ when the animal realises that there is no real threat to the social group. Laughter evolved out of that second signal – the false alarm signal. In the wild, echoing the laughter of others was functional because it amplified the signal and dispersed it to the entire social group, spread out over a considerable area. Hence the socially infectious quality of laughter and why many find themselves sheepishly laughing along with sitcom laughter tracks.

Human beings are hot-wired to mimic. Consider how babies engage in mirroring behavior. Language, too, is socially contagious. I swear more and do so more creatively after watching an episode of ‘The Thick Of It” and, for a brief period in the Summer of 1997, I found a way to wedge the word ‘obviously’ into every sentence. Clearly, mimicry was an important quality for our species to possess. Creatures that were good at reading changes in the behavior of others must have had a major advantage. If you react to your neighbour’s reaction to a rustle in the bushes rather than wait to hear the rustle yourself, you speed up the process of fleeing from a potential predator. This is all part of our makeup that has been genetically selected as per ‘survival of the fittest’.

Interesting as all that may be, you might be wondering what it has got to do with poker? Well, every year, I get asked ‘Why aren’t you going to Vegas?’ and every year I respond ‘Why are you going to Vegas?’ You see, I just don’t understand the appeal. Vegas itself is horrible, an over-wrought effigy of all that is wrong with humanity. It’s a strip of desert half-way across the world with 122 casinos, utterly devoid of culture; the vulgar and seedy sump pit of America. Now, I appreciate that some people like sump pits, that some even excel and do their best work in sump pits (Copper Face Jacks at 4am on a Saturday night for example… ahem, Jaymo, cough!) but it’s just not my cup of tea.

And as for the World Series of Poker, well it’s for the dreamers and it’s well established by now that I am a coward. The way I see it, every year, the vast majority of the world’s elite poker community (as well as huge numbers of enthusiastic recreational players) descend on Vegas for the annual punting of bankrolls. A bunch of them walk away with a tidy profit, a few of them become millionaires but the vast majority will do their proverbial bollocks in what is the biggest festival of wealth redistribution on the poker calendar.

For some of them, it makes sense. They are rolled for it. They might even like live poker. But for so many, shot-taking of this nature is so completely at odds with Kelly Criterion. And the thing that baffles me the most? So many of these guys are really smart bankroll managers who keep their shot-taking to a minimum. They understand that an annual trip to Vegas profoundly increases their risk of ruin. Yet, when June rolls around, they get on a plane (or 7 planes with 5 layovers if you are Dara O’Kearney and Daragh Davey), destination: Varianceville.

I’m not saying that these optimistic young go-getters are not long-term profitable in these events. Quite the contrary. These tournaments are veritably oozing with value. But when you consider the travel and accommodation costs, the expenses and the sharing of your edge with stakers (as most lads are at least being sensible enough to reduce variance by selling some action), then I don’t think your expectation is compensating you enough for the lost opportunity to grind online during what is the most profitable month of the year.

The only explanation is that going to Vegas is a ‘monkey-see monkey-do’ social contagion; that much like yawning, laughing, language and clapping, a poker player’s annual pilgrimage to Sin City represents an evolutionary hangover that plausibly accounts for why the human mind seems to work on the principle that 100,000 lemmings cannot be wrong.