If you’ve ever watched a football game, you might agree that football fans are very creative, exuberant, and vibrant folks. Dressed in team colors, fans of their respective teams will dress like a dizzying array of animals or other mascots to support their chosen favorite team. Through identification with the sport and its players, these fans start to shape their identity around all things “insert football team name here.” The team and fellow fans become their group, aka their in-group. An in-group is the group that someone identifies with and favors over others. Their days and nights revolve around football and their team during the season, encompassing their identities. Applied social psychology helps to uncover the explanation for this behavior.
The social identity theory of psychology explains that one’s identity is based on personal and social types of self-knowledge. Personal refers to a sense of self and social to membership or identification with social groups. Social groups can be anything from gender, nationality, religion, vocational, sports, or any number of other groups of people with similar qualities or interests (Gruman, 2016). Sports fans demonstrate the theory of social identity perfectly because of the member’s attitudes and actions and the conflict that arises due to group evaluation and comparison.
Members of groups want to feel good about their group, which, in turn, can provide a positive social identity. Fans get together dressed in silly outfits to root on their team to show solidarity and spend time with the group they identify with, which encourages positive attitudes toward each other. It also reinforces group membership. Unfortunately, this in-group positivity can also cause out-group dislike or negativity. An out-group is a group in opposition to the in-group, not necessarily in competition. Still, the group is different from the in-group (Gruman, 2016). In sports and specifically football, group rivalries are strong and can cause intense animosity between groups. This happens because groups evaluate each other through social comparison, another psychological theory that explains group conflict. Groups evaluate and compare one another and determine if the other is worth conflict or not. If there’s a status difference, such as one group’s team is the champion or has won many games in a season, and the other group hasn’t, then there’s more reason for animosity (Gruman, 2016).
The severity of animosity varies based on the strength of the previously established rivalry, if there is one. In a study of sports fans and group conflict, researchers discovered that teams with historic rivalries produced the most significant amount of between-group enmity. Interestingly, it was found that in the absence of a rivalry, conflict between groups was not prominent (Weisel & Böhm, 2015). The construct of rivalry can be a determinant in many situations where group conflict occurs. The results could yield a future intervention focus. Weisel and Böhm also found another social psychological theory that could play a role in group interactions and subsequent conflict.
The deprivation/gratification theory explains that people, and in our case, groups of fans, might feel deprived of something desirable (Gruman, 2016). Often groups perceive they have received less than a comparison person or group, which causes conflict. To apply the theory to sports and fan groups, each group hopes their team wins the elusive championship. Some teams spend years without winning games, let alone that large, shiny trophy. Feeling deprived of the joy of winning, some groups develop even more intense enmity toward other groups (Weisel & Böhm, 2015). Social psychology theory explains why fan groups are so intense about their allegiance and the source of group conflict between opposing fans. Understanding the reasons for those fights between rival football fan groups is one way social psychologists can develop interventions that might reduce or solve the negative feelings that cause conflict.
Works Cited
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2016). Applied social psychology : Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE Publications.
Weisel, O., & Böhm, R. (2015). “Ingroup love” and “outgroup hate” in intergroup conflict between natural groups.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 60, 110-120. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2015.04.008