Sports fans, especially at the World Cup, use their clothes and colors to show their team identity. But it is not just apparel; fans’ self-esteem and sense of belonging are also tied to their team, researchers say. Fans may have no direct contribution to match outcomes, but they feel each win and loss as their own.
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If their team wins, fans wear team colors the following day and brag about how “we” won the day, a behavior researchers have dubbed “basking in reflected glory,” or binging.
But if their team loses, fans cast off their team jerseys and talk about how “they” did not perform as well, thereby “cutting off reflected failure,” or Corning.
These behaviors are “all interconnected, and they all have to do with self-esteem,” said Jonathan Jensen, associate professor of sport administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
How a team’s win or loss reflects on the fan
A 1976 study first described Binging and Corning.
Almost 40 years later, Jensen and his colleagues sought to replicate that study. They surreptitiously monitored — with approval of the institutional review board — how many of over 200 students wore school-affiliated apparel during roll call for each class, throughout the college football season at seven universities.
The researchers found that if a student’s football team won a game, it more than doubled the odds of the student wearing the team’s apparel in the following class. Winning also more than tripled the likelihood of wearing more than two articles of team-branded clothing. This Binging effect also diminished for each day that elapsed since the game.
Conversely, a loss significantly reduced the odds of wearing team apparel by more than half and reduced the odds of wearing two or more articles of team clothing by over 70 percent.
These findings tally with the original study, Jensen said. Sports fans “choose to wear the apparel to signal to members of both the in-group and out-group which team they’re affiliated with, and they’re doing so to boost their own self-esteem,” he said.
Winning or losing not only changed how fans dressed, but also how they talked about their affiliation to the team to signal whose side they are on.
“It’s that notion of yes, wanting to be part of an in-group, but also a desire not to be a part of an out-group,” said Andrew Billings, executive director of sports communication at the University of Alabama.
In one study, Billings and his colleagues used machine learning to analyze more than 7,000 geotagged tweets made during 2018 World Cup matches pitting England against Croatia and Colombia to analyze Binging and Corning in real time.
They found that English fans tended to bask in reflected glory when England was leading or victorious, increasing the use of pronouns such as “we,” “us” and “our” to show their affiliation with the soccer team when their team scored or saved a goal.
In contrast, the fans used pronouns such as “they,” “them” and “their” when England trailed or lost. Interestingly, fans still Barged when their team was ultimately defeated by Croatia, probably because the team still made it to the semifinals — an accomplishment for England in the World Cup.
“It's really about how sports becomes a conduit for feeling a part of the in-group or being part of a group membership,” Billings said.
There are hints that these sports matches can affect fan physiology as well as their sense of self-esteem and belonging.
Researchers collected the saliva of 21 male fans watching the 1994 televised World Cup soccer match between Brazil and Italy to measure their testosterone levels before and after the match.
After Brazil won the match on a penalty kick, their fans’ testosterone increased, while the testosterone of the losing Italian team fans decreased.
(Interestingly, the Italian fans were also less willing to provide salivary samples the day following their team’s defeat; one Italian postgame sample was also contaminated with blood and couldn’t be used.)
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