Why do we put our hands on our heads when something makes us also want to yell "NO!"
Why do we put our hands on our heads when something makes us also want to yell "NO!"
For instance, when your team misses a super close shot at scoring, or when you lose a super tense game match by a hair.
There's a reel of a dad watching a sport game on TV with his infant son. The kid keeps looking at his dad for how to react, and seems to understand what's happening on the TV. When the team scores a point, the kid throws his hands up into the air and cheers, having seen his dad do that behaviour before.
Then he looks to his dad, who's got his hands on his head, saying "NO!". It was the wrong team that scored.
The kid puts his head into his hands, and collapses on the couch in his best imitation of his father.
You have years, perhaps decades, of watching people in your culture do this. So it feels natural for you to do.
Interesting, never thought about that. Now I'm curious how far back we'd need to go in different cultures until we don't see anyone doing this kind of thing - nowadays I think it's pretty common around the globe.
As a counterpoint to the above comment, there are also instinctual behaviours that we don't even know we're doing. The proof is in that blind-from-birth people have been seen performing the same sorts of behaviours as sighted people, but they can't possibly have learned by watching.
Smiling is one such proven example, as are hand movements when talking.
I'm not sure where the head-in-hands of despair falls with regard to this, but given that we see other great apes and monkeys do similar things in similar situations, there might well be an element of instinct to it.
Watch it have been some ancient Navy SEALS hand signal meaning FUBAR and it caught on when the ancient warrior automatically used it as he saw his hut burning down from an accidental fire. Now, all of humanity uses it.
Mirror neurons!
Good point. Would there be cultures that don't do this?
Probably, but I'm not familiar enough with all cultures to give examples.
I don’t know, but I like having the name for this be surrender cobra:
Now I just need to find a reason to use this term!
Because you're trying to keep your brain from exploding!
hands-on-head is nature's helmet
It's things like this that feel weirdly tragic; that our ancestors went through so much shit that only the ones with weird reflexes to grab their cranium made it. Young enough to have not had kids yet mind you. Other kids reacted in other ways, but they didn't survive. And so here we are, grabbing our heads when our team doesn't score, a chromosomal echo of some brutal day in the Kenyan Great Rift Valley..
Holy shit that actually makes sense
I'm pretty sure that's a learned cultural behavior.