The Celtic penalty outrage is not driven by facts and facts won’t change it.

The real-life phenomenon of Chinese whispers, or the telephone game, is based on the idea that a story tends to go through a different level of exaggeration with every person who hears it and passes it on. By the time the person who started the story hears it back, it has mutated into a different form.

This was studied in the 1930s by a psychologist called Frederic Bartlett. He found that every person who hears and passes on a story reconstructs it according to their own biases, social situation, outlook, opinions, existing assumptions and cultural expectations. We do not record things we hear from other people. We reshape them. So naturally, when we share them, the version we share is ever so slightly coloured by ourselves.

Allport and Postman, in 1947, produced The Psychology of Rumour, which essentially built on Bartlett’s theory. Allport and Postman said that stories are repurposed in three main ways.

Levelling is when certain details disappear from the story. Sharpening is when certain details are re-emphasised, overemphasised or strengthened to become more clearly the core point of the story. Assimilation is where the story is reproduced in a way that confirms the personal prejudices, grievances, expectations or wish fulfilment of the person passing it on.

What we’ve seen over the past two days is one of the clearest examples of the evolving nature of a story you could ever hope for. It has been fascinating to watch the various versions of it that now exist out there in people’s heads. It really is quite incredible. You do not need a degree in psychology, or a background in psychological studies, to understand that these are all people in search of a rationalisation.

We do not make decisions the way we think we make decisions.

More often than not, we make decisions emotionally and reflexively. We do not put an awful lot of thought into them. On those occasions when we seem to be pondering, what we are often really doing is not deciding but rationalising. In short, we make the decision in a microsecond, and the thought process that appears to take place afterwards is actually about finding a way to justify it to ourselves.

I recently got into the show Peep Show, and one of the things I loved about it was that Mark Corrigan makes all his decisions reflexively and emotionally, but constructs his rationalisations so perfectly that it allows him to live with whatever decision he has made. No matter how horrible, no matter how callous, no matter how cruel, no matter how self-destructive and self-defeating they might be.

What makes Mark Corrigan such a compelling character is that all of us do this, and all of us know that we do it. That’s the kind of thing you should remember when you study the media’s coverage over the last two days, because this is an absolute standout example of an emotional reaction in search of a stabilising rationalisation.

Some folk are waiting for people to admit they were wrong. That’s not going to happen. They’ll simply change the way they view it in their heads.

Not only do we possess the ability to reframe events the way we want to see them, but we are also very good at inventing new justifications for decisions we have already made in real time. So, just as the game of Chinese whispers involves a story evolving from one form into another, such as the penalty coming “nine minutes into five minutes of time added on”, as though the penalty should be taken the instant the foul is committed lest we go over the allotted limit, people can also change facts or reinterpret them as the moment requires.

I’ve been watching this with a lot of disgust, but also a lot of amusement, over the last 24 to 36 hours. It’s amazing to me how textbook some of this is, because you start from the premise that it’s not a handball. Then, when the footage proves that it is a handball, the story has to subtly shift.

Nobody is going to turn around and say, “Well, you know what? I didn’t think it was a penalty. Now I do.” They have already got emotionally invested in the story of Celtic as the beneficiaries of some giant, whatever it is they think is happening in their minds. Some of them have invested a lot of intellectual effort in standing that up.

So, the story shifts from: it didn’t hit his hand.

To: well, was it clear and obvious?

Because VAR can only get involved in a clear and obvious decision.

Once you point out to them that a handball in the penalty area, which the referee missed, is the definition of a clear and obvious error, the ground shifts again to some variation of: well, maybe it was, but are we really giving penalties for that?

To which I will say, well, if the rule book says that we do, then yes.

Then they try to reinterpret the rule book. McCoist has twice suggested we do away with it altogether for decisions which go against his wishes, which is raging entitlement if I’ve ever seen it.

Some of them pull every single phoney justification they can find for suggesting that the rule book does not actually say what we think it says. This is where precedent also comes out. I notice how many people, whether wittingly or unwittingly, are using precedents involving decisions the Ibrox club did not have given against them.

Which just amuses the hell out of me.

“If that wasn’t a penalty, then this isn’t a penalty.”

Well, a lot of us said at the time that that was also a penalty. Just not any of you.

Which leads, of course, to the next great refuge of the scoundrel: “That would not have been given at the other end.”

That isn’t really an argument that it’s not a penalty. It’s the old lazy “West of Scotland clubs” argument which has been discredited a million times or more.

It also flies in the face of the number of those decisions that we’ve seen against us this season alone. I only have to refer you back to the League Cup semi-final and Tony Ralston falling on top of the ball with his hands tucked in so that he does not give a penalty away, and still getting penalised for it.

Yes, it would have got given at the other end. I have no doubt about that whatsoever.

Then today, the latest evolution arrived: well, the majority are outraged about this, so case closed. As if that has brought some new fact to the table.

It was Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 who wrote in his diary that “sanity is not statistical”. If every other person in the world either believes a lie or is willing to repeat the lie, you do not become less sane because you stand against it on the side of the truth.

Put another way, I could not give a shit that Tom English and all of his buddies on the BBC panel, all of whom are desperate for someone to win this title other than Celtic, still think it’s not a penalty. I don’t care how many voices in England, people who get their information on Scottish football from Ally McCoist, are screaming about conspiracies and claiming it’s not a penalty. It’s a penalty.

The fucking footage proves that it’s a penalty.

They can cry as much as they want. They can gather together in their little cult and squeal as much as they like. It does not change the fundamental fact, which the SFA is going to verify when they discuss it.

Along the way, we’ve heard every weird variation of this tale. We’ve all laughed already, of course, about the physics experts who say that the ball’s flight proves the head was the meaningful contact. I mean, this is absolute rubbish. The idea that the human hand cannot make a ball go a good distance is idiotic when you consider netball, volleyball and basketball, all sports that rely on propelling the ball with the hand.

There are those who say that the arm was only up because of the collision with Trusty. I mean, that really is a grievance in search of an excuse.

There are people who have complained that the decision was made too quickly. Those, by the way, are the same people who complained that a previous decision involving Celtic took too long to make.

This, of course, ties into the other reason why it couldn’t have been a penalty: because it’s part of a pattern of decisions which have favoured us.

This is a story that starts with an assumption, and from that assumption these people are trying to find a rationalisation, something that supports their pre-existing view that a penalty given to Celtic in the last knockings of an absolute must-win game had to be the wrong decision. They came at it from that angle before they had even seen a replay, and I genuinely believe that is the case for most of these morons.

I know a lot of people are hoping that there will be some blinding fact that emerges which will make all this make more sense to these people. But that’s not going to happen.

These people are not going to change their minds. What they will do is slightly alter the nature of their argument, and that’s how you know it’s dishonest. If you start from the premise of being outraged about one thing, then suddenly shift so that you’re outraged about something else, your outrage itself is suspect.

When you consider who most of these people are, it’s even clearer that there is no way we’re getting a fair hearing. There is no way anyone is going to suddenly, spontaneously agree that we’re right when they have been arguing that we’re wrong. Facts and logic are not going to change that.

Look at some of the people we’re supposed to believe are neutral in this.

You’ve got McCoist running his mouth off, as he always does at every decision Celtic get. You’ve got Ryan Stevenson, who has spent the entire campaign telling Celtic fans that Hearts are going to win the title and how he cannot wait for that day to come. Ewan Cameron, anyone? You’ve had John Robertson on TV the other night, a Hearts legend, associated with that club for his whole career, complaining bitterly about this decision. You have Tom English, who never saw a chance to stick the boot into Celtic that he wasn’t going to take. You have Kris Boyd, of course, arguing against a decision that Celtic got even after he has been able to watch it a dozen times.

Yet people wonder why the perception is that the majority have come down on one side of this. They made their minds up before they even saw a replay.

For whatever reason, by whatever rationale, their minds arrived at the conclusion and they’ve been trying to bend reality to fit it, and nothing is going to change that. If you suddenly proved conclusively and definitively, by finding the player’s fingerprints on the ball, that he touched it with his hand, they would simply shift from one version of this to another without even blinking.

It is one of the most dishonest narratives I have ever seen pushed, but it has its roots in a very real psychological phenomenon.

These people are emotionally overwrought. They had so much invested in Hearts winning this title that they cannot imagine anything else. Every single one of them is ready to nurse this grievance for the rest of their lives if we take that hope away.

When you look at the Hearts players and you look at Derek McInnes and the despair in their faces, that same look of despair was evident in newsrooms all over the country.

The two narratives they have been pushing all season, how great it would be if Hearts won the title for Scottish football, and how Celtic were finished, have both collided with reality. We were a busted flush. We had no chance of winning.

Some of them even put our chances at 0%.

These people were desperate for this. Right here is their rationalisation.

It wasn’t lost. It wasn’t won by Celtic. It was stolen from Hearts.

Do you think some Celtic TV footage is going to change that?

Do you think a definitive Willie Collum statement explaining why it is a penalty is going to alter this one bit?

I’ve seen too much of this to believe that.

It is embarrassing how wedded these people are to their narrative now. It is embarrassing how many subtle variations some of them have gone through for why this isn’t a penalty. I would prefer if they just cut the bullshit and got straight to the point.

It can’t be a penalty because they don’t want Celtic to win.

At least that would be honest. At least that would be an admission that this whole process starts from that thought, and everything else flows from there. That’s a version of this I could accept. I would laugh at it but I’d appreciate the straight talk.

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