As such, shared attention leads to various cognitive, behavioural, and affective outcomes, the most relevant in the present context being emotional amplification ( Lin, Keegan, Margolin, & Lazer, 2014 Shteynberg, 2018) and mood convergence ( Shteynberg, Hirsh, Galinsky, & Knight, 2014). In turn, the self perceives the world from the collective angle of ‘our attention.’ Objects or information that receive shared attention also receive deeper cognitive processing ( Shteynberg, 2015, 2018), which in turn increases their psychological impact on the self ( Shteynberg, Bramlett, Fles, & Cameron, 2016). The perception of a group of individuals to synchronously co-attend to the same object or stimulus is assumed to give rise to a unique psychological perspective ( Shteynberg, 2010, 2015, 2018). Furthermore, soccer also appears to substantially affect the stock market with price drops corresponding to billions of dollars following defeat of the respective national soccer team ( Ashton et al., 2003 Edmands, García, & Norli, 2007).Īnother theory of group emotion that has recently been gaining momentum is shared attention ( Shteynberg, 2015). In a rare example of extreme escalation, riots during a soccer match between El Salvador and Honduras even led to a temporary suspension of diplomatic relations between the two countries ( Lever, 1969). For instance, team losses have been linked to heightened rates of attempted suicides (Steel, 1994) and psychological distress ( Banyard & Shevlin, 2001). Indeed, while wins of one’s identified national soccer team have been related to enhanced national pride (Maennig & Porsche, 2006), greater overall spending and socialising behaviour ( Jones, Coffee, Sheffield, Yangüez, & Barker, 2012) as well as more favourable assessments of one’s own economic situation and government satisfaction ( Schramm & Knoll, 2017), there appears to be a dark side too. Soccer not only reaches billions of spectators but also affects them on various levels. Across the globe, more than 3.2 billion people watched the 2014 FIFA World Cup and more than 1 billion watched the final between Germany and Argentina (1–0 FIFA, 2015). The fascination of soccer has long spread far beyond its traditional strongholds in South America and Europe, with more US-Americans watching the 2014 FIFA World Cup than the same year’s NBA finals ( Atwell Seate, Na, Iles, McCloskey, & Parry-Giles, 2017). Soccer is the world’s pre-eminent team sport ( Ashton, Gerrard, & Hudson, 2003) and along with the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup is one of the most globalised, prestigious, and socially electrifying events in the world ( Giulianotti & Robertson, 2007). Soccer is deeply rooted in German culture and the FIFA World Cup represents one of the most ritualised events in German society ( von Scheve, Beyer, Ismer, Kosłowska, & Morawetz, 2014). For millions of German spectators this was not just any loss. When South Korea beat incumbent world champion Germany at the 2018 FIFA World Cup, they made history: Never before had the German national team been eliminated during the first stage of the World Cup. Taken together, the findings suggest group emotions (collectively felt emotion irrespective of individual affiliation) rather than group-affiliation based emotions (individually felt emotion because of an affiliated group), as the dominant process underlying spectator affect during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
Although fans experienced slightly more intense affect than non-fans, particularly during losses, this moderating effect was very small in comparison to the magnitude of the affective fluctuations that occurred independent of fan identity. Across the three German matches, multi-level models revealed that all spectators exhibited strong changes on both affective dimensions in response to Germany’s performance. Employing an app-based experience-sampling design, we tracked 251 German spectators during the tournament and assessed high-resolution changes in core affect (valence, activation) throughout soccer matches. To address these questions, we used the 2018 FIFA World Cup as a natural quasi-experiment to conduct a pre-registered study on spectators’ emotional experiences. However, it is rather ill-understood how exactly spectators’ emotions unfold during soccer matches and what determines their intensity. There is ample evidence that watching sports induces strong emotions that translate into manifold consequential behaviours.