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People are often motivated to increase others' positive experiences and to alleviate others' suffering. These tendencies to care about and help one another form the foundation of human society. When the target is an outgroup member, however, people may have powerful motivations not to care about or help that \"other.\" In such cases, empathic responses are rare and fragile; it is easy to disrupt the chain from perception of suffering to motivation to alleviate the suffering to actual helping. We highlight recent interdisciplinary research demonstrating that outgroup members' suffering elicits dampened empathic responses as compared to ingroup members' suffering. We consider an alternative to empathy in the context of intergroup competition: schadenfreude— pleasure at others' pain. Finally, we review recent investigations of intergroup-conflict interventions that attempt to increase empathy for outgroups. We propose that researchers across the range of psychological sciences stand to gain a better understanding of the foundations of empathy by studying its limitations.

Intergroup competition makes social identity salient, which in turn affects how people respond to competitors' hardships. The failures of an in-group member are painful, whereas those of a rival out-group member may give pleasure—a feeling that may motivate harming rivals. The present study examined whether valuation-related neural responses to rival groups' failures correlate with likelihood of harming individuals associated with those rivals. Avid fans of the Red Sox and Yankees teams viewed baseball plays while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjectively negative outcomes (failure of the favored team or success of the rival team) activated anterior cingulate cortex and insula, whereas positive outcomes (success of the favored team or failure of the rival team, even against a third team) activated ventral striatum. The ventral striatum effect, associated with subjective pleasure, also correlated with self-reported likelihood of aggressing against a fan of the rival team (controlling for general aggression). Outcomes of social group competition can directly affect primary reward-processing neural systems, which has implications for intergroup harm.

The purpose of this research was to test if the ways sport fans felt while supporting their favourite teams – both in terms of typical feelings and changes in feelings over time – were associated with different combinations of harmonious passion (HP) and obsessive passion (OP) for being a sports fan. We conducted two studies in which fans reported how they typically felt while watching their favourite teams (Study 1, N = 430), and how they were feeling at three time points throughout an 8-month season (Study 2, N = 418). The results showed that the most adaptive fan outcomes (i.e., low negative feelings, high positive feelings and enjoyment) were associated with high HP combined with low OP. In contrast, the least adaptive fan outcomes (i.e., high negative feelings, low positive feelings and enjoyment) were associated with low HP combined with high OP. These results help us understand more about how the feelings of sports fans are shaped by combinations of HP and OP.

This paper focuses on international sports personality in figure staking Yuzuru Hanyu, who plays for Japan, and his transnational fandoms in China, to examine the politicisation of his evolving fandom during and after his performance at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Our contribution is to illustrate the value of analysing fandoms in the Chinese social media as a method that seeks to advance a decolonised approach to communication studies. This study uses digital ethnography to collect data and conducts critical thematic analysis to illustrate the complexity of socially mediated fandom debates and flames. Consulting interdisciplinary literature in sports fandom and communication, athletic branding, and political communication, we propose a fresh critical approach to Chinese communication studies, which we have conceptualised as “fandom as method.” We offer a case study to illustrate this critical approach, which we argue is a contribution to decolonising scholarship by promoting inclusivity of alternative approaches, in communication studies in the global south. “Fandom as method” can excavate new terrain, rather than simply adding to West-centric theoretical advances. Findings underscore that critically analysing the complex interplay between fans, anti-fans, and the authorities through “fandom as method” can reveal previously undetected communication patterns. More importantly, fandom as method can help us interrogate the nuances of communications situated within complex, dynamic, evolving patriotic and nationalistic social media discourses. This approach helps to explicate opaque clashes of “mainstremeist belief and action” in the name of patriotism and nationalism which, in the Chinese context, are subject to intervention from the authorities as the ultimate other. It reveals how social media activity politicises a sports personality, a fandom trend that seems likely to spill over into other spheres of the entertainment industry.

Consumers prefer brands positioned around identities they possess. Accordingly, the consumer identity literature emphasizes the importance of a clear fit between brands and target identities, suggesting that identity marketing that explicitly links brands to consumer identity should be most effective. In contrast, five studies demonstrate that explicit identity-marketing messages can backfire. Messages that explicitly connect a particular brand to consumer identity increase the salience of external determinants of behavior, reducing consumers’ perceptions of agency in identity expression. Hence, compared to messages that merely reference consumer identity, messages that explicitly define identity expression reduce purchase likelihood, despite more clearly conveying identity relevance. These findings highlight the need to consider consumers’ need for agency in addition to their drive for self-definition and expression through consumption, offering a foundation to examine both the risks and the rewards of identity marketing.

The spread of digital media culture can be seen in action in almost every walk of life. The use of online media results in new solutions even in the most common practices, and the field of sports and related fan cultures are no exceptions to that. From the mid-2010s, the trend of sports events, athletes, and their fans becoming more and more connected to online space can be well observed. This transformation generates significant changes, which can often have far-reaching effects. One such phenomenon is that excellent athletes can appear in the role of online opinion leaders or influencers. In the following study, I present these processes based on the results of a recent study that examined changes in Hungarian fan habits in connection with the 2021 European Football Championship. The second half of the study then focuses on how changes in fan practices contribute to making athletes the most valuable players in the influencer market.

During live sporting events, fans often create intense atmospheres in stadiums, expressing support for their own local players and discouragement for the opposition. Crowd hostility directed at opposition players surprisingly elicits contrasting reactions across different sports. Tennis players, for example, have reported that hostile crowds are hurtful and disrespectful, whereas footballers often praise and encourage such hostility. What explains this tension? Why are hostile atmospheres considered wrong for some athletes, and not for others? We argue that creating hostile atmospheres for opposition players functions as a form of hostile affective scaffolding, as it scaffolds affective states in such a way that harms the interests of the opposition athletes, while promoting the interests of fans. These hostile atmospheres wrong the scaffolded insofar they constitute a form of recognition disrespect, and to the extent that they violate the formal rules and conventional norms internal to the sporting practices. Although the focus is on the sporting context, our analysis reveals significant implications for a more nuanced understanding of what hostile scaffolding is, and how we should understand its normativity. The existing literature views hostile scaffolding as constituted by a setback to the overall interests of the scaffolded, and that the wrong-making feature of this scaffolding is necessarily explained by harm. Instead, we argue that hostile scaffolding should be understood as hostile relative to a set of interests that an agent has, not just their overall interests, and that the wrong-making features of hostile scaffolding are not limited to harms.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an area of great interest, yet little is known about how CSR is perceived and practiced in the professional sport industry. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, including a survey, and a qualitative content analysis of responses to open-ended questions, to explore how professional sport executives define CSR, and what priorities teams have regarding their CSR activities. Findings from this study indicate that sport executives placed different emphases on elements of CSR including a focus on philanthropic activities and ethical behaviors. The data suggest that professional sport executives view CSR as a strategic imperative for their business. Sport executives indicated that a number of factors influenced the practice of their CSR including: philanthropy (altruistic giving), an emphasis on the local community, partnerships, and ethical concerns. We also examine important organizational variables for sport (winning, revenues, and team value) and highlight their relationship with reported CSR involvement. We discuss the implications of the findings and propose recommendations for both theory and practice.

This study examines the relationship between cognitive awareness and perceived knowledge of sports fans’ social media engagement behaviors. Data were collected through an online survey of 236 adults from India who identified as Indian Premier League (IPL) fans. The findings of the study suggest that perceived knowledge and cognitive awareness of sports are precursors to social media engagement behaviors of sports fans. Further, sports fandom mediates links between perceived knowledge and cognitive awareness with social media engagement. The findings hold special significance for contemporary COVID scenarios because physical engagement is being substituted by digital engagement.

Experience alters behavior by producing enduring changes in the neural processes that support performance. For example, performing a specific action improves the execution of that action via changes in associated sensory and motor neural circuitry, and experience using language improves language comprehension by altering the anatomy and physiology of perisylvian neocortical brain regions. Here we provide evidence that specialized (sports) motor experience enhances action-related language understanding by recruitment of left dorsal lateral premotor cortex, a region normally devoted to higher-level action selection and implementation--even when there is no intention to perform a real action. Experience playing and watching sports has enduring effects on language understanding by changing the neural networks that subserve comprehension to incorporate areas active in performing sports skills. Without such experience, sport novices recruit lower-level sensory-motor regions, thought to support the instantiation of movement, during language processing, and activity in primary motor areas does not help comprehension. Thus, the language system is sufficiently plastic and dynamic to encompass expertise-related neural recruitment outside core language networks.