Wall St.Journal Weekend 29Feb2020

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, February 29 - March 1, 2020 |C5

REVIEW

When Rewards

Work Better

Than Penalties

Dear Dan,

One grocery store I

shop at charges a

nickel for paper bags,

while the other gives

me a nickel when I bring my own

bag. Which approach is more likely

to reduce paper-bag use? —Paul

Charging for bags is an increasingly

popular strategy for reducing

waste. New York State’s new ban on

plastic bags, which goes into effect

on March 1, allows cities to charge

a five-cent fee for paper bags. This

raises the general question of

whether punishment or reward is

better at changing our behavior.

Punishments are very powerful

for motivating people to do some-

thing that they only have to do

once—for example, installing a

smoke alarm in their house or im-

munizing their children. But when

it comes to repeated behaviors, pos-

itive rewards are more effective. In

a 2011 study, researchers found that

when physicians in a hospital were

given positive feedback for washing

their hands, they were much more

likely to do it regularly. The same

principle should apply here: Offer-

ing shoppers a credit for bringing

their own bag should yield better

results than charging them a fee.

Dear Dan,

Religion is supposed to make people

behave better, but do more religious

societies actually have less unethi-

cal behavior and crime? —Chad

Research suggests that religion can

play an important role in fostering

ethical behavior, but its effects

aren’t consistent across the board.

A recent paper in the journal Psy-

chological Science examined crime

data from 1945 to 2010 for over 170

countries and found that as reli-

gious affiliation went down, homi-

cide rates tended to go up—but

only in areas with relatively low ag-

gregate intelligence scores. How

causation works among these vari-

ables isn’t clear, but I suspect that

areas with higher intelligence

scores are more likely to have insti-

tutions such as schools and commu-

nity organizations that help to fos-

ter ethical behavior. So while

religion isn’t the only factor, some

kind of strong social institutions

are crucial for curbing our worst

impulses.

Hi, Dan.

We all know that we’re going to die

one day, but most people don’t pre-

pare wills or make guardianship

plans for their children. Is there a

way to motivate people to take es-

tate planning seriously? —Shani

Making a will forces us to think

about an event that we don’t want

to imagine, to make complex deci-

sions, and to plan for something

that feels very far away. All these

factors encourage us to procrasti-

nate. But while we experience pain-

ful feelings when we think about es-

tate planning, the pain for our

survivors is much larger if we don’t

make a will.

My research lab at Duke works

with a startup called GivingDocs

that tries to overcome these obsta-

cles. Before making a will, it asks

people to think about the legacy

they want to leave behind and the

causes they care about, then helps

them plan bequests to the charities

that matter to them. This general

approach—combining a painful act

with distant results, like creating a

will, with something that’s immedi-

ately meaningful, like donating to

charity—is a good way to get peo-

ple to overcome their tendency to

procrastinate.

ASK ARIELY

DAN ARIELY

Have a dilemma for Dan?

Email [email protected]

Questions may be revised or edited.

RUTH GWILY

BYCHANDRAHASCHOUDHURY

nizes ceremonies to deepen and

extend the occasion, such as a

pregame roast beef lunch for 300

at the Ashbourne Leisure Centre.

The lunch was rich in reminis-

cences about the records and

landmarks of Shrovetide football,

an opportunity for the British to

indulge their great fondness for

obscure facts and pedantry. You

go to it to learn who was the

youngestplayerevertogoalthe

ball (Frank Mansfield, age 13, in

1955), when was the last time the

game had to be abandoned be-

cause the ball got lost (1960) and

how many Ashbournians have en-

joyed the honor of both goaling

the ball and turning it up (nine,

the latest being Mr. Lemon).

Even the ball has its own tra-

ditions. Two of the most popular

souls in town are Simon Hellaby

and Tim Baker, local painters

who each year meticulously paint

the match balls with scenes rele-

vant to the life of the turner-up.

Then, after the paint has been

scraped or washed off in match

play, they do it all over again, so

the ball can be presented to the

goal-scorer as a memento. If no

one manages to score, the ball

goes instead to the turner-up.

Vivid and colorful match balls

from years past are highly prized,

and more than a dozen hang

above the bar in The Coach &

Horses.

Because the flow of the game is

so unpredictable, most shops in

Ashbourne board up their win-

dows while it’s being played. Even

so, the game is a great boost to

the local economy. For a whole

week in what would otherwise be

the off-season, pubs and hotels

are full of visitors drawn by the

prospect of time-traveling back to

the Middle Ages. “The actual

game days are always the biggest

business days of the year,” said

Ms. Waring. “On Thursday, people

come out again to celebrate the

end of the game and to discuss

the result. And then they do it

again on Saturday.”

At 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday eve-

ning, after hours of pitched battle

in the town and the bog-like

fields nearby, the Up’ards goaled

the ball. But on Wednesday, with

only 40 minutes left to play, the

Down’ards equalized, and the

game finished in a tie, 1-1.

Mr. Choudhury is a novelist

who lives in India and the U.K.

His novel “Clouds” was

published by Simon & Schuster

in 2019.

‘I hope we’ll

be playing this

great game

of ours for

generations

to come.’

ANDREW‘CLUCK’LEMON

and south, respectively, of the

Henmore River that runs through

the town. These days the geo-

graphical distinction no longer

holds, since all of the town’s ba-

bies are born in the same mater-

nity hospital. “So today your fam-

ily ties determine whether you’re

an Up’ard or Down’ard,” said

Tonya Waring, the owner of The

Coach & Horses pub on Dig

Street, and a Down’ard.

The Shrovetide match, known

by some as “Ashbourne’s Christ-

mas,” is fundamental to the

town’s sense of itself. Fierce and

sapping, the game is a local rite

of passage. Just about every fam-

ily has an ex-player in its ranks

and usually one or more

players in the hug.

Although there is

nothing in the rules to

proscribe participation

by women, usually only

men play; even the

“turner-up,” a local per-

sonage of some impor-

tance who throws the

ball into the crowd to

start the action, is always

a man. Records show,

however, that three

women have goaled the

ball over the years. In

1891, when authorities

tried to crack down on

the game, a local history

records that a certain

Mrs. Woolley “hid the

Shrovetide ball under her

voluminous skirts” and

threw it out to the wait-

ing players from the win-

dow of a building in the

marketplace.

Today, the game seems

to generate enough tasks, posts,

roles and titles to include almost

all of Ashbourne’s 7,800 residents,

men and women alike. The town

council is heavily involved with or-

ganizing the match. (The mayor,

Ann Smith, describes herself on

the council website as “a passion-

ate Down’ard.”) Then there is the

Shrovetide Football Committee,

made up mostly of ex-players,

which referees the game and, inev-

itably, resists attempts to change

or modernize it. One of the com-

mittee’s tasks this year was decid-

ing whether the Henmore River, its

banks overflowing after the wet-

test winter in Britain in more than

a century, was in bounds. They

ruled that it was.

The committee also selects the

year’s two turner-ups and orga-

A

t 2 p.m. last Tues-
day, in a parking lot
in the ancient Eng-
lish market town of
Ashbourne in the
Derbyshire Dales, an elderly man
climbed onto a brick plinth in
front of a crowd of some 3,000
people. As two Union Jacks
flapped in a chill wind behind
him, he held up a large, ornately
painted leather ball. Those clos-
est to him could see that it had
the date and his name—Andrew
“Cluck” Lemon—inscribed on it.
Then he threw the ball where the
crowd was packed the tightest,
into a knot of muscular men
dressed in sports jerseys
and tracksuits.
The ball promptly disap-
peared into the scrum,
known colloquially as “the
hug.” There was no bound-
ary between the players
and spectators, who
pressed in to take pictures
and videos, shrieking and
breaking for cover if the
action erupted in their di-
rection. For a few minutes,
the only clue to the ball’s
location was a small, slow-
moving cloud of steam
where the players panted
over it. They were special-
ists in what was called
“hug play”; around the
edges of the action, mean-
while, there prowled lithe
young men who excelled in
running. All year long, they
had been dreaming of re-
ceiving a pass from a team-
mate in the hug and sprint-
ing more than a mile—
across meadows, over fences,
through ponds—to the post where
they would “goal it,” winning glory
for the rest of their lives.
It was Shrove Tuesday, tradi-
tionally a day of feasting and
merriment before Lent’s 40 days
of austerity. In England, raucous
ball games have been a Shrove-
tide pastime since the 12th cen-
tury, enjoyed in particular by the
lower orders, though deprecated
by the gentry for their disorder
and violence. Out of these amor-
phous games, played as local cus-
tom and inclination dictated,
evolved the modern sports of
football (”soccer” in America)
and rugby, which are now played
all over the world. Only in a few
English towns does Shrovetide
PHOTOGRAPHS BY FABIO DE PAOLA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALfootball still exist in its original

form: a game played not on a

field but in public spaces, involv-

ing an unlimited number of play-

ers who can use their hands and

feet to move the ball.

In a fast-changing world,

Shrovetide football radiates a

consoling timelessness. To the

residents of Ashbourne it is a key

to their history. A pre-match song

dating back to 1891 says it well:

“Through the ups and downs of

its chequered life/ May the ball

still ever roll/ Until by fair and

gallant strife/ We’ve reached the

treasured goal.” “I hope we’ll be

playing this great game of ours

for generations to come,” de-

clared an emotional Mr. Lemon

just before he put the ball in play.

Ashbourne’s game is played on

Shrove Tuesday and the following

day, Ash Wednesday, from 2 p.m.

to 10:30 p.m. If the ball is goaled

before 5:30 p.m., play restarts in

the town’s center, while if a player

scores after 5:30, the game stops

for the day. At the end of the sec-

ond day, the team that has scored

the most goals wins. Given that

the goals are three miles apart,

the scores are usually low: Only

once in the last 15 years have

more than two goals been scored.

The rival teams, the Up’ards

and the Down’ards, traditionally

consisted of natives born north

In Ashbourne, England, thousands of residents join in an annual

match that has defined the town for centuries.

A Medieval

Football Game,

Still Going Strong

Tonya Waring holds the

decorated ball her father Darren

used to score a goal in 1996.

Above, a scene from this week’s

Shrovetide football match in

Ashbourne, England.