By Kate Elwood / Special to The Japan News
10:00 JST, March 10, 2024
The great thing about culture is that it’s everywhere. I am not a fan of baseball, but my spouse is, and as a result I’ve been to several games and spent many, many more hours in our living room, with one game or another playing on TV. Unsurprisingly, I’ve acquired a tiny bit of knowledge of the sport, though this is surprisingly meager considering all the hours of auditory input accrued. Sports, like foreign languages, require more than mere exposure. Without genuine engagement, some points are picked up but deeper comprehension remains sketchy.
Luckily for me, though, I have a great interest in culture, and culture permeates everything. And as the research of Roxie Chuang, a researcher of cultural influences on decision-making, and her three colleagues makes plain, baseball is no exception. In a paper published in 2022, Chuang and her team provide evidence for a phenomenon which fans of baseball in the United States and Japan may already have anecdotal awareness: players on American teams are bolder in seeking home runs.
Chuang and her colleagues analyzed Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball data over 15 seasons, from 2005 to 2019, encompassing 70,462 MLB games and 25,778 NPB games. The average number of home runs per game in the MLB was 1.06, but it was only .82 in the JPB. As the researchers point out, this means that over........