From Fan to Fat?: Vicarious Losing Increases Unhealthy Eating, but Self-Affirmation Is an Effective Remedy

Sport watching is more popular than ever: 108 million Americans watched the 2013 NFL Super Bowl and 2.2 billion people watched the 2010 FIFA soccer World Cup. Using archival and experimental data, we explore whether the vicarious defeats and victories that supporters experience influence their ability to regulate their food intake. Supporters tend to perceive their team’s successes and failures as theirs (Hirt et al. 1992), which has a measurable effect on their self-regulation abilities. Football and soccer defeats, especially when they are narrow or unexpected, increase alcohol-related criminality (Rees and Schnepel 2009), traffic fatalities (Wood, Mcinnes, and Norton 2011), and domestic violence (Card and Dahl 2011). Consistent with studies showing that ego threats increase preferences for indulgent food (Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice 1993), we expected that people would eat less healthily after the defeat of a football team that they support. Second, as vicarious sports victories improve the perceived self-worth of supporters (Hirt et al. 1992), we hypothesized that vicarious football victories would lead to healthier eating. Third, we expected that allowing supporters to self-affirm after experiencing a vicarious defeat would eliminate its impact on unhealthy eating, as self-affirmation reduces the impact of vicarious sports defeats on self-serving biases (Sherman et al. 2007) and, more generally, improves people’s self-regulation abilities (Schmeichel and Vohs 2009).