Effects of Moral Reasoning and Team Identification on Sports Fans' Psychological Health

When presented with troubling information about a player they root for, sports fans may engage in the coping strategies of rationalization and decoupling. This study explores how using those strategies affects fans' social, eudaemonic, and hedonic psychological health when presented with an athlete having objectionable political associations and social media posts. A four (decoupling/coupling/rationalization/control) by three (low/medium/high team identification) experiment revealed that there were no differences in psychological health between moral-reasoning conditions or the control, suggesting that even if fans rationalize or decouple to cope, rooting for someone with objectionable political associations does not affect their well-being. However, team identification directly affected some measures of hedonic and eudaemonic well-being, but not social well-being. Implications for players, fans, teams, sport marketing, and media psychology are discussed.