Coping with Team's Defeat: the Effect of Imagination on Postgame Emotions among Sports Fans

Abstract

Abstract

Coping with Teams Defeat: the Effect of Imagination on Postgame Emotions among Sports Fans

The growing professional sports industry in the present era has shed light on the importance of sports fans in sustaining and developing the spectator sports market. Sports fans manifest a wide range of values, attitudes, and behaviors which have attracted scholars for investigation. According to previous work, sports fans often tend to bask in the teams glory (BIRGing) or cut off from their failure (CORFing). Nevertheless, real-world observation demonstrates that sports fans also frequently remain loyal toward their team despite its low ranking or steady poor performance in the league. Research on this particular behavioral aspect of sports fans and how they cope with the teams failure, however, has rarely been conducted.

The current study is an attempt to provide insights regarding the mechanism of coping among the fans of the defeated team. Amid a number of potential factors that can affect sports fans postgame emotions, this study looked into fans imagination. More specifically, the study observed the generation of counterfactual and prefactual thoughts-combinedly referred to as imagination in the current research- by the defeated fans. The primary objective of this study is twofold: first, to assess the imaginative thoughts generated by the defeated fans and second, to examine the relationship between sports fans generation of imagination and their postgame emotions.

Results revealed that sports fans who were instructed to produce prefactual imagination generated more thoughts compared to those who generated counterfactual imagination. Also, both the counterfactual and prefactual imagination groups generated a greater number of upward than downward imaginations. Most importantly, results showed significant effect of generating imagination on the defeated fans postgame emotions. Specifically, counterfactual imagination group exhibited weaker negative postgame emotion than the control group. Likewise, counterfactual and prefactual imagination groups displayed stronger positive postgame emotion than the control group.

The current study is one of the the first studies to deal with sports consumers coping with their teams failure. This study will add useful knowledge to sport management literature by providing insights regarding sport consumer behavior and psychology. As the first research to particularly focus on sports fans generation of imaginations, this study will extend the literary scope of counterfactual and prefactual thinking as well. Lastly, understanding how the consumers cope with a sports teams poor performance can be significant in the managerial perspective because it can help marketers develop effective communication strategies and foster a long-term relationship with their fans.

Keywords: Imagination, Counterfactuals thoughts, Prefactuals thoughts, Sports Fan, Postgame Emotions, Consumer Coping, Emotion Modulation