This is a very interesting article in the ny times sports section on the mentality of golfers when making a birdie and par putt:

Even the world’s best pros are so consumed with avoiding bogeys that they make putts for birdie discernibly less often than identical-length putts for par, according to a coming paper by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. After analyzing laser-precise data on more than 1.6 million Tour putts, they estimated that this preference for avoiding a negative (bogey) more than gaining an equal positive (birdie) — known in economics as loss aversion — costs the average pro about one stroke per 72-hole tournament, and the top 20 golfers about $1.2 million in prize money a year.

I wonder how much this hedging plays in cultural and evolutionary terms? Why would the brain believe that the risk of missing a birdie is less than the risk of missing a par? Are there cultural analogies to par? Is the C- one of those things? Just pass baby? The distinction here is that with so much to gain, why wouldn’t maximum effort be made on every try? Risk aversion and fear seem to be the same thing here. Fear can drive us to excel. It would also seem that by creating an arbitrary bar of performance, or par, individuals tend to move toward it, like a Gaussian thought suggestion. Is it all in our minds?