Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Group identity matters for myriad outcomes. There is a host of research showing how human tribalism often leads us to treat the ingroup well and the outgroup badly. We use data on close to half a million soccer supporters to test theories of group identity. Collaborating with the Forza Football app during their Player of the Season vote in May 2018, we randomly assigned users to conditions that made certain aspects of identity more salient. Our results show that even a mild manipulation of national identity (in a context where another identity is more salient) changes voting behavior. We report a positive effect on voting for a candidate when users are reminded they share a national identity. We also explore various heterogenous effects among subgroups using pre-treatment measures of strength of identity from a survey of 188,000 individuals. Most notably, the effect is larger among those for whom nationality is more important.