Health - Why you think your team is the best

Go team! (Image: Dave Sandford/ NHLI via Getty Images)

Ah ref! Now you have an excuse for thinking your team always performs best. Your brain perceives the actions of people in your own team differently to those of a rival team.

Pascal Molenberghs at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, divided 24 volunteers into two teams and had them judge the speed of hand actions performed by two people, one from each team.

As expected, most of the volunteers were biased towards their own team, judging their players as faster, even when the two actions were performed at identical speeds.

Surprisingly, brain scans taken during the task showed that this bias arises from differences in brain activity during perception of the hand action and not during the decision-making process. The work will appear in Human Brain Mapping.

Louise Newman, a psychologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, says the research is an important step to unravelling the mechanisms of how people develop perceptions of "in-groups" and "out-groups". This can inform our understanding of racism and discrimination, she adds.

http://www.newscientist.com