Underdog State of Mind

“Who gon' stop me
Underdog of the year
Call me Rocky”

(from “Salute” by Machine Gun Kelly, written when he was just a skinny kid from East Cleveland)

I moved to Cleveland in August 2010 to do my PhD at Case Western Reserve University. I recall the first few times I walked into the locker room of the University gym. Overhearing the other guys, there was one major topic: LeBron James. His decision to leave for Miami, a month earlier, stung badly. “He’s a coward,” said one guy.

I spent five years in Cleveland, and the underdog sentiment of the city was always palpable. The city had been waiting for a championship win for decades. People had their expectations calibrated for loss and failure, with just a faint hope of success remaining.

I have lived most of my life in underdog places. I grew up in Växjö, a medium-sized Swedish city that feels almost, but not quite, like a big city. I did my doctoral studies in Cleveland, long the butt of national jokes (but more recently a shining example of urban renewal). I’ve spent the last decade in Jersey City, across the Hudson river from Manhattan, close enough to see the city, far enough to not be part of it. All of these places share an underdog state of mind.

One of my favorite studies, a 2011 paper by Jonah Berger and Devin Pope in Management Science, gives us some hints of the psychology of underdogs. Berger and Pope analyzed thousands of NBA and NCAA games and asked: what happens to a team that’s losing at halftime? The received expectation would be that they lose more often. But that’s not quite what the data showed. Teams down by a single point at halftime win about six percentage points more often than expected, actually outperforming the teams ahead of them by a single point.

The mechanism at play here is known as “prospect theory.” Losing feels worse than an equivalent gain feels good, so when you’re behind, loss aversion kicks in and you try harder. This creates a special kind of energy to succeed. But the effect only works when you’re slightly behind. Teams that are down by more than a point don’t get the same boost, because the gap starts to feel overwhelming.

In 2015, my last year in Cleveland, the Cavs, led by a returned LeBron, made the NBA Finals, but lost. So close, yet just not enough. The year after I left for the east coast, the Cavs won, and the whole city went bonkers. People stood on cars downtown, and the joy knew no bounds.

Stevens, where I’m now an associate professor, shares that underdog state of mind: not quite NYU, not quite Columbia, but with an urgency about what we are building that I recognize from every underdog city I’ve lived in. So, slightly behind at half-time, but I’ll take it.