When people say things like this, it sounds just a little condescending. It's not nearly as stupid as your indifference suggests. Humans are abstract thinkers.

When people say things like this, it sounds just a little condescending. It's not nearly as stupid as your indifference suggests. Humans are abstract thinkers. We like to generalize principles from our observations. We often live our lives by these principles, so to the extent these principles effectively predict the future and allow us to manage our lives better, we're going to form an attachment to them. When you make another observation of success based on the principles that you appreciate, this reinforces part of your decision making framework. For fundamental principles, you probably have many, many decisions bound up in their correctness. If a principle turns out to be wrong, it will be very costly to correct all the decisions based on the wrong principle, so it's exceptionally rational for feeling creatures to hope for their principles to be validated by more observations. Apple is a company with some very public and explicit principles. Plus, these principles make products. If you think products by a certain company make your life a lot easier, you're going to want them to thrive. Some people actually hold the principle that particular companies are more innovative than others and if they didn't exist, some of the products they like simply wouldn't exist. For example, Android exists today, and some of those phones are pretty similar to the iPhone. But many people don't think Android phones would exist today in anything like its current manifestation if Apple hadn't done iPhone. This is arguable, but that's certainly beside the point. Many, many people truly believe this, and it can't be disproved. Identifying with sports teams depends. It's hard to believe you don't understand that people usually follow and identify with sports team because of instinctive tribalism. However, you can follow teams for other reason. I'm an avid sports follower, and in general, I glom onto different teams and story lines at the beginning of the season, and it seems to have to do with proving to other fans my predictive abilities. Other reasons I follow certain teams is because I believe the principles by which they're led will achieve a higher degree of success over time, e.g., I admire the core tenets by which the Spurs and Patriots run their organizations.