Butler Matt, Brar Gurjot, Abed Riadh, O'Connell Henry
Neuropsychiatry Research and Education Group, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Trinity College Dublin, Limerick, Ireland.
Front Psychol. 2025 Jan 10;15:1517295. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517295. eCollection 2024.
Association football (soccer) is the world's most popular sport. Transculturally, fans invest significant resources following their teams, suggesting underlying psychological universals with evolutionary origins. Although evolutionary science can help illuminate the ultimate causes of human behaviour, there have been limited modern evolutionary perspectives on football fandom. In this paper, we consider evolutionary perspectives on football fandom from a behavioural neuroscientific standpoint. We discuss how the appeal of football may arise through the low-scoring and highly variable outcomes of games; we relate this to the neuroscience of reward prediction errors and motivation. We highlight recent research on the psychobiological responses to ritual, including endorphin release, which may reduce anxiety and facilitate group bonding. We discuss the prosocial and anxiety-sublimating effects of the matchday ritual and argue that football may be a special case whereby ritual behaviour does have a small effect on the outcome of interest. We discuss the psychology of ingroup and outgroup effects of fandom and argue that, although resource scarcity can sometimes lead to aggression, that larger inter-group effects can be positive. We comment on the socioemotional developmental aspects of football fandom, and note how group identification may lead to displays of sacrifice. We finish with a discussion of whether, in the era of social prescribing, football could be seen as a psychiatrist's tool. We conclude with suggestions on how the positive aspects of football can be emphasised through evolutionary perspectives, and how future research on football fandom may inform evolutionary understanding of humans .
英式足球是世界上最受欢迎的运动。在不同文化中，球迷会投入大量资源追随他们支持的球队，这表明其中存在具有进化起源的潜在心理共性。尽管进化科学有助于阐明人类行为的终极原因，但关于足球迷现象的现代进化观点却很有限。在本文中，我们从行为神经科学的角度来探讨足球迷现象的进化观点。我们讨论了足球的吸引力可能如何通过比赛得分低且结果高度可变而产生；我们将此与奖励预测误差和动机的神经科学联系起来。我们强调了最近关于对仪式的心理生物学反应的研究，包括内啡肽释放，这可能会减轻焦虑并促进群体凝聚力。我们讨论了比赛日仪式的亲社会和焦虑升华作用，并认为足球可能是一个特殊情况，即仪式行为确实对相关结果有微小影响。我们讨论了球迷群体内和群体外效应的心理学，并认为，尽管资源稀缺有时会导致攻击性，但更大的群体间效应可能是积极的。我们评论了足球迷现象在社会情感发展方面的情况，并指出群体认同可能如何导致牺牲行为的表现。我们最后讨论了在社会处方时代，足球是否可以被视为精神科医生的工具。我们通过提出如何通过进化观点强调足球的积极方面，以及关于足球迷现象的未来研究如何增进对人类的进化理解的建议来结束本文。
