The professional sports events industry is becoming immensely popular due to a global social shift toward larger numbers of spectators at sports events and an ever-increasing variety of such events. This study aimed to investigate the impact of spectators’ perception of corporate social responsibility on regional attachment by applying social identity theory. The present study introduces two mediators, namely, spectators’ pride and team identification, to enlighten the relationship between spectators’ perception of corporate social responsibility and regional attachment, thus contributing to the literature on corporate social responsibility in sports. This quantitative study used a time-lagged approach to collect data in three waves at a time interval of one week and the final sample consisted of 511 respondents (i.e., spectators). Hierarchical regression analysis bootstrapping approach was utilized to analyze the hypothesis. We found that the spectators’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility positively influenced their team identification, and this relationship was mediated by spectators’ pride. In addition, spectators’ pride positively influences regional attachment, and this relationship is mediated by team identification. These findings provide new directions for understanding corporate social responsibility, team identification, spectators’ pride, and regional attachment in sports contexts. The practical and theoretical implications are discussed.
Keyword
regional attachment
;
spectators’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility
;
spectators’ pride
;
team identification
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
, 2021
, 95
SSCIABDC-A
Abstract
Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful individual elicits the intention to support, d = 0.49 [0.43, 0.55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one's group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood.
Keyword
Attachment
;
Cross-cultural
;
Emotional crying
;
Emotional tears
;
Social support
