Psychology of Taboo
Monday night, since Joseph was visiting from out of town, a few of us got together to hang out and play a somewhat-friendly game of Taboo. For the uninitiated, it's a relatively simple game where one member of a team has to describe an object or phrase for his team to guess, without using particular descriptive terms - kind of like verbal charades with "taboo" restrictions. Anyhow, as we almost always do for some reason, we got split up into the guys' team and the gals' team, and played using the more difficult purple side of the word cards.
To put it bluntly, it was a slaughter. General Custer had nothing on the guys' team. The final score was something like 61-47, but it wasn't even that close, seeing as how the guys got pity points on our last round where we got three (count'em, three) hourglass timers... and still ended up with like 1 point for that round. You know you're getting absolutely owned when you feel pretty good about a round of 4 points, but then the next two girls get 7. I think we had a couple of negative rounds in there too.
Why the domination? Time to break out some stereotypes and a few observations...
1) Girls tend to be more relational and place emphasis on shared experience
The girls' team was able to rack up points in a short amount of time primarily through two methods: describing the thing in terms of previously shared experiences or shared knowledge with other girls on the team. For example, "I'm knitting one of these for Andrea," "Lucas likes to eat these on Sundays," "This is Joy's favorite place to go in Los Angeles," "When I was growing up I hated this," and so on so forth. These were all "quick points," meaning that the first or second guess after the description was correct. The quality of your Taboo team can be reliably judged on the average number of QPs you could get per round, since each would give you that much more time to gesture wildly and come up with random synonyms for the harder ones. I'd estimate that the girls' team had a QPA (quick points average) of 2.5, while the guys were definitely less than 1, perhaps 0.7. The fact that the members of the girls' team were probably closer to each other than the members of the guys' team gave the former a significant advantage in the contest. Well, that and the fact that they were just plain better at describing things.
2) Guys tend to remember things independent of who was there
This may relate to a conversation I had with Jen S on Saturday regarding the age-old question of why guys are able to remember sports statistics from 1987 but can't remember their wife's birthday. I suspect this is because most guys are generally hard-wired to know facts, but not how those facts relate to people. I can remember distinctly the sweet left-handed bullet pass I threw during basketball PE my junior year, but I don't remember who was on my team or who I threw the pass to. I can remember the most trivial of facts from The Lord of the Rings but I can't remember who I went to see the first movie with, even though I waited in line with them for hours beforehand. Guys tend to be satisfied with facts alone, while girls will have more of a desire to make those facts into an experience with other people. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that when playing Taboo, the other guys in the room will have the same useless facts stored away that you do.
I do distinctly remember one Taboo experience where I was able to connect with teammates based on our realization that we shared the same knowledge of useless facts. Sometime in college, I was on a team with Cal, who was the clue-giver, and also Danny. Cal looked down at his card, and said, "Cincinnati Reds catcher." Immediately, Danny scored the QP with "Bench." The very next card, Cal said, "Dennis Boyd, pitcher." I piped up with "Oil Can" (the pitcher's nickname) for the second consecutive QP, a rarity for most guys' teams I've been on. Finally, Cal completed the trifecta with, "Charlie Hustle." "Rose!" It was heartwarming to know that other people had grown up studying the same baseball history books that I read back when I was young. That was a connection. Yeah.
The one QP we were able to score on Monday came on: "Nemesis of GI Joe." "Cobra!" That was sweet.
Maybe I should come up with a version of Taboo more geared towards the male psyche. This would include clues that would allow you to say stuff like, "The Big O averaged one of these for a whole season," "He was the main character of Robotech," and "This is the game you could get 30 lives in."
Monday night, since Joseph was visiting from out of town, a few of us got together to hang out and play a somewhat-friendly game of Taboo. For the uninitiated, it's a relatively simple game where one member of a team has to describe an object or phrase for his team to guess, without using particular descriptive terms - kind of like verbal charades with "taboo" restrictions. Anyhow, as we almost always do for some reason, we got split up into the guys' team and the gals' team, and played using the more difficult purple side of the word cards.
To put it bluntly, it was a slaughter. General Custer had nothing on the guys' team. The final score was something like 61-47, but it wasn't even that close, seeing as how the guys got pity points on our last round where we got three (count'em, three) hourglass timers... and still ended up with like 1 point for that round. You know you're getting absolutely owned when you feel pretty good about a round of 4 points, but then the next two girls get 7. I think we had a couple of negative rounds in there too.
Why the domination? Time to break out some stereotypes and a few observations...
1) Girls tend to be more relational and place emphasis on shared experience
The girls' team was able to rack up points in a short amount of time primarily through two methods: describing the thing in terms of previously shared experiences or shared knowledge with other girls on the team. For example, "I'm knitting one of these for Andrea," "Lucas likes to eat these on Sundays," "This is Joy's favorite place to go in Los Angeles," "When I was growing up I hated this," and so on so forth. These were all "quick points," meaning that the first or second guess after the description was correct. The quality of your Taboo team can be reliably judged on the average number of QPs you could get per round, since each would give you that much more time to gesture wildly and come up with random synonyms for the harder ones. I'd estimate that the girls' team had a QPA (quick points average) of 2.5, while the guys were definitely less than 1, perhaps 0.7. The fact that the members of the girls' team were probably closer to each other than the members of the guys' team gave the former a significant advantage in the contest. Well, that and the fact that they were just plain better at describing things.
2) Guys tend to remember things independent of who was there
This may relate to a conversation I had with Jen S on Saturday regarding the age-old question of why guys are able to remember sports statistics from 1987 but can't remember their wife's birthday. I suspect this is because most guys are generally hard-wired to know facts, but not how those facts relate to people. I can remember distinctly the sweet left-handed bullet pass I threw during basketball PE my junior year, but I don't remember who was on my team or who I threw the pass to. I can remember the most trivial of facts from The Lord of the Rings but I can't remember who I went to see the first movie with, even though I waited in line with them for hours beforehand. Guys tend to be satisfied with facts alone, while girls will have more of a desire to make those facts into an experience with other people. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that when playing Taboo, the other guys in the room will have the same useless facts stored away that you do.
I do distinctly remember one Taboo experience where I was able to connect with teammates based on our realization that we shared the same knowledge of useless facts. Sometime in college, I was on a team with Cal, who was the clue-giver, and also Danny. Cal looked down at his card, and said, "Cincinnati Reds catcher." Immediately, Danny scored the QP with "Bench." The very next card, Cal said, "Dennis Boyd, pitcher." I piped up with "Oil Can" (the pitcher's nickname) for the second consecutive QP, a rarity for most guys' teams I've been on. Finally, Cal completed the trifecta with, "Charlie Hustle." "Rose!" It was heartwarming to know that other people had grown up studying the same baseball history books that I read back when I was young. That was a connection. Yeah.
The one QP we were able to score on Monday came on: "Nemesis of GI Joe." "Cobra!" That was sweet.
Maybe I should come up with a version of Taboo more geared towards the male psyche. This would include clues that would allow you to say stuff like, "The Big O averaged one of these for a whole season," "He was the main character of Robotech," and "This is the game you could get 30 lives in."
posted by Bob at
7:14 PM
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