Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)

by Robert B. Cialdini

The relationship between sport and the earnest fan is anything but gamelike. It is serious, intense, and highly personal. An apt illustration comes from one of my favorite anecdotes. It concerns a World War II soldier who returned to his home in the Balkans after the war and shortly thereafter stopped speaking. Medical examinations could find no physical cause for the problem. There was no wound, no brain damage, no vocal impairment. He could read, write, understand a conversation, and follow orders. Yet he would not talk—not for his doctors, not for his friends, not even for his pleading family. Perplexed and exasperated, his doctors moved him to another city and placed him in a veterans’ hospital where he remained for thirty years, never breaking his self-imposed silence and sinking into a life of social isolation. Then one day, a radio in his ward happened to be tuned to a soccer match between his hometown team and a traditional rival. When at a crucial point of play the referee called a foul against a player from the man’s home team, the mute veteran jumped from his chair, glared at the radio, and spoke his first words in more than three decades: “You dumb ass!” he cried. “Are you trying to give them the match?” With that, he returned to his chair and to a silence he never again violated.