Terror management and the vicissitudes of sports fan affiliation: the effects of mortality salience on optimism and fan identification
✍ Scribed by Mark Dechesne; Jeff Greenberg; Jamie Arndt; Jeff Schimel
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 184 KB
- Volume
- 30
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0046-2772
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The present research examined the hypothesis derived from terror management theory that identi®cations with sports teams shield against the potential consequences of awareness of death. Experiment 1 demonstrated that Dutch participants who were reminded of their death expressed greater optimism about the results of the national soccer team compared to a control condition. Experiment 2 conceptually replicated this ®nding with American participants and college sports teams. In addition, Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that success of a team is a prerequisite for sports fan aliation to function as a buer against death concerns. Before the college football season began, participants who were reminded about death expressed greater relative preference for a more salient, but less successful college football team over a national college champion basketball team compared to control participants. However, after the football team lost its ®rst game of the season, participants who were reminded about death indicated greater relative preference for the successful basketball team. Results are discussed with regard to the psychological function of social identi®cations.