How Watching Sports Shapes Zero-Sum Thinking: Correlational, Experimental, and Longitudinal Evidence

초록

The popularity of professional sports has increased exponentially in recent decades. Although prior social psychological research has emphasized how sports foster group identification and social bonding, we show that consuming sports-related content has an unintended cognitive consequence: strengthening zero-sum beliefs. Specifically, watching and following sports increases the belief that success inherently requires others to lose. Across two correlational studies (Studies 1 and 2, Ns = 788, 1,994), two experiments (Studies 3 and 4, Ns = 1,164, 585), and one longitudinal study (Study 5, N = 830) conducted in the United States and India, we find that watching and following sports is both correlationally and causally associated with zero-sum thinking. These effects extend beyond sports contexts to shape attitudes toward immigrants and a distributive (win-lose) orientation in negotiation. Together, our findings reveal how sports engagement can systematically influence social cognition and broader worldviews.

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