Dynamics of Fan’s Experience during Basketball Games
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Team sports can elicit intense emotions and foster strong group identities among fans. Previous literature suggests that collective arousal can lead to the alignment of psycho-physiological states, a phenomenon that is known as collective effervescence. But what exactly is it about the experience of attending sporting events that lead to this emotional alignment and the concomitant group affiliation? To address this question, an intriguing paradox was considered: UConn’s women’s team is the most successful female team in college basketball history. Despite this success, attendance has been dropping over the years, in contrast to that of the men’s team, which is less successful. We question if there are differences between the fan experience in both UConn Basketball teams. We looked at fans of the basketball teams of the University of Connecticut (UConn) and compared their physiological and psychological experiences while attending men’s and women’s games to quantify levels of collective effervescence as a proxy for group bonding. |
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