It doesn't exactly have a lot to do with brains vs. brawn as some have suggested. It all comes down to basic instincts, the primal shit that came with us up the evolutionary ladder.
First off, physical activities and competitions in general are highly regarded because they're signs of fitness and health, and those are things we are naturally inclined to approve of because they indicate worthy mating partners. Seriously. Freud wasn't completely talking out of his ass when he said the human mind revolves around sex, he just got ironically way too obsessed with dicks and went off in a weird direction with it. Approval of general fitness goes along with things like attraction to symmetrical faces as basic things our ape brains use to say "hey, go sex them, their offspring will probably be healthy." This is part of the reason people like watching sports, because it's basically an abstract parallel of checking out someone hot person's body.
Second, we like competition, plain and simple. It gets the blood and various chemicals in the brain flowing, and they feel good. It's best when we're actually a part of the competition going on, but thanks to our brains being really fancy we can vicariously enjoy competitions that we're not a part of. This is why you see people getting so ridiculously invested in a particular team: it's pretty much a subconscious (or conscious in some cases) self-insertion into the team. They work themselves up to thinking that they're really part of it, because that makes it more exciting and fun.
Third, sports are a display of positive social interaction. Humans are hierarchical social creatures, and we all aspire to have tons of friends and good relationships with people. Sports teams and people who are enthusiastic about sports tend to be pretty solid on the groups of friends thing, and that drives people to approve of them. On the other hand, reading is a loner activity, and doing things alone reads as a person being a social failure, and our funny little ape brains see that and say "nope, social outcast, there must be something wrong with them, fuck 'em." That's why a lot of bullying is directed at people who read a lot or play video games a lot or are just really quiet and not very sociable. It's just a really basic "sociable = good, not sociable = bad" thing that we just naturally think because throughout the history of our species and our ancestor species those who were not sociable had a very hard time finding a mate and producing offspring, and that legacy rears its head today in the form of picking on nerds.
So there you go, that's my take on it. By the way, the above was mainly my opinion, not necessarily stuff backed up by psychological studies and whatnot. It could be, but I didn't bother doing any research and I don't recall seeing anything confirming most of the above, so take it all with a grain of salt.
Hatsune Candy said:
I find it difficult to say that anything is the "social norm" because it's different depending on who you ask (which is evident after actually reading the whole thread). I think the idea that there is even such thing as a social norm is an illusion created by the various forms of media and entertainment that we just blindly accept without question. Everyone's experience of society as a whole is independent and vastly unique, to say that anything is a norm is the say that the vast majority of humanity has or will experience it; and given how big and diverse the human race is, that's just very unlikely.
Eh, defining the social norm is pretty easy, actually. The thing that makes it slippery is that it's totally subjective and it changes frequently. The social norm isn't anything to do with what the vast majority of people like, it's what the majority are willing to
accept as being normal. It comes down to a tautology: the social norm is what society considers normal. Currently it would violate the social norm to run around in public dressed in nothing but a polar bear mask while yodeling, but if at some point a majority of people would just shrug and not think much of it then it would be a social norm. This is why seemingly mutually exclusive things (such as being a political conservative and being a political liberal) can both be the social norm. It's not about a majority shared experience or opinion, it's simply a majority acceptance of such things being okay.
Oh, also, social norms obviously don't apply to humanity as a whole. They vary from place to place, just like social customs and laws, and for the exact same reasons. There is indeed a vast range of differences present in humanity, but it is indeed also possible to discover the prevailing sentiments of people in certain areas of the world.
