And so I thought it would be good to take a few statistics during the weekend of how my sporting success affected my mood. I took some basic number notes after each match of the four sports I played over the weekend, and came up with the following results. Note that I've rounded off the would-be ridged line to give a more realistic interpretation of the two variables measured.
But this graph doesn't really answer the question of how much winning affects my mood. So I've taken these raw results and shuffled them onto a new plane. On this graph, the closer my measurements are to the diagonal line, the more related my happiness and success apparently are, or in other words, the more important winning is to me.
It seems that I don't stick too much to the diagonal line, but definitely do hover around it. I guess this means that winning helps my mood, but doesn't control it. There are many other conclusions that can be drawn from this chart, but I'll leave you to make them. I'll just note one thing I find particularly interesting, and that is that my mood seems to be most happy when I am at a particular level of success. So too much winning equals bad. Who would have thought?
Thoughts:
ReplyDelete1. There is a few points (in Hockey) were you are losing and happy. Interesting.
2. Correlational information cannot be used to draw causation. So you cannot state that winning helped your mood. Your mood could have helped your winning. Or there could have been a third, intermediate factor, such as me! Maybe when I was there you won (expected) and because I was there, you were happy (common).
Damn, I should have included the variable of my proximity to David at any given time. That would have explained the results better. Perhaps.
ReplyDeleteAll your points are quite true. However I wasn't trying to draw causation, I was simply investigating whether my winning and mood were correlated. But I guess I was leaning towards the idea that my mood was affected by my winning and not the other way around.