Why Support the Underdog?

Poses the puzzle of the near-universal underdog-support bias — present across cultures (American, Japanese/anime, the Israelites vs Goliath), persisting even for the doomed (Thermopylae) or the evil (a grudging awe at bin Laden 'from a cave'). The striking empirical hook: a study showing Israel vs Palestine maps swung support ~30 points purely by which side was drawn as the underdog, while teaching factual history moved opinion ~0%. Then the evolutionary-psychology puzzle — the preconscious brain is normally expert at ending up on the winning side, so why back the loser? Candidate explanations (a brake on any one person getting too powerful — but that smells of group selection; going where status-rewards are scarcest — but the math doesn't scale) are each dismissed as unsatisfying, ending 'I'm stumped. What does Less Wrong think?'

Quality 70 · Strong. Upper-Solid. A memorable observation anchored by a genuinely striking data point (the map study), but short, and it poses the puzzle rather than resolving it (it sets up the followup), so it lands at the top of the Solid band.

Claude’s paradigm shift 40 · Moderate. Moderate — the underdog bias is a known phenomenon; the freshness is the framing and the map-study deployment.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Poses an evolutionary-psych puzzle (underdog bias) anchored by a striking map study, but stays a discourse-internal curiosity with no adoption into policy, practice, or ordinary life → RWI 2.