"Football is life!"

Okay, I can't wait for the next season of the Apple TV+ television series "Ted Lasso" to begin later this summer.  I haven't been a huge football (the sport called soccer here in the U.S.A.) fan in the past, though watching the series peaked my interest.  I've recently started watching the English Premier League and following the Everton Football Club (because that's Paul McCartney's favorite club!).  The season just recently ended, and Everton just narrowly missed relegation (the bottom three teams get sent down to the next level below the Premier League, which I think is called the English Football League).  

Football fans are highly devoted to their clubs.  They often get in shouting matches with opposing fans, and in some cases, they even get violent with each other!  So, with that as context, the question is how deep does the "hatred" for rival teams in English Football go?  A group of psychologists asked this exact question, asking whether fans of say of Manchester United would help a fan of Liverpool F.C. in an emergency (these two highly successful teams are apparently arch-rivals - kind of like University of Michigan versus Ohio State fans!).

The study (published in the journal, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) followed the methodology of a now classic study ("From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior") by John Darley and Daniel Batson (I like to call this the "Good Samaritan" study - for details, see my post "Who is my neighbor?").  Basically, male undergraduate students at Lancaster University were recruited to participate.  Importantly, all of the participants were self-identified Manchester United F.C. fans.  They were told that they would be participating in a study of football fans' love of the sport.  They were "primed" to think about Manchester United F.C. (by answering a number of questions in an interview setting) before being instructed to walk across campus to another building for the next part of the study.  While walking towards the other building, one of the members of the research team (acting as the victim) came jogging by and pretended to fall and hurt his ankle.  The victim was either wearing a non-descript T-shirt, a Manchester United T-shirt, or a Liverpool F.C. T-shirt.  Three hidden observers then rated how each subject responded noting whether participants noticed the accident and whether they stopped to help.

Study participants were more likely to help the victim wearing a Manchester United F.C. T-shirt, stopping to help 85% of the time versus only 31% of the time when the victim was wearing a plain T-shirt.  However, they weren't any less likely to stop to help a victim who was wearing a Liverpool F.C. T-shirt, stopping 30% of the time (again, compared to 31% of the time when the victim was wearing a plain T-shirt).  The researchers concluded that belonging to the same social group (in this case, Manchester United fans) increases the likelihood of stopping to help someone.  

The research team repeated the study, this time cueing in on the fact that study participants were football fans (in other words, the question and interview "primed" the participants to think about football in general and not specifically on Manchester United).  Again, belonging to the same social group increased the likelihood that the participants stopped to render assistance to the victim (Manchester United T-shirt: 80% stopped; Liverpool F.C. T-shirt: 70% stopped; Plain T-shirt: 22% stopped).

Social bonds are incredibly powerful!  Just go back to a post from a couple of years ago, "Why didn't you tell me about the 'Jeep Wave'?".  Here is what I said then about finding out that I was part of the special group of Jeep Wrangler owners:  "All we really need in this world is something to be a part of - whether it is a family, a community, a club, or a team.  We just want to belong to something.  What a great gift for a team leader - that feeling of togetherness that we are all here for one purpose, one goal, one mission.  There is a collective vision that keeps pushing us towards our ultimate goal, and as a team, we can achieve great things together."