United in defeat: shared dysphoria fuses members to the collective

The human propensity to sacrifice oneself for non-kin is not easily accounted for by evolutionary theories, yet throughout human history people have fought and died for non-kin across a wide array of contexts. Here, in the context of football fandom, we reveal the psychology that glues individuals to one another and the collective, motivating self-sacrifice. Counter to classic studies that show group victories to increase ingroup identification, our findings suggest that sharing the agony of defeat acts as an even more powerful social glue. Using measures of identity fusion and psychological kinship with the group we found that fans of consistently top teams in the UK’s Premier League were less strongly bonded to their clubs than fans of teams consistently among the bottom performers. Further analyses supported our hypotheses that long-lasting memories for past defeat on the pitch form a durable and essential part of fans’ personal selves and that fan bonding is associated with tendencies to sacralise club-related values and engage in parochially altruistic acts towards fellow fans. How football fans share and acknowledge group membership with thousands of other fans mirrors forms of alignment in other social groups, particularly male-dominated groups involved in ritualised collective action, such as armies, military insurgent groups, or religious collectives. We anticipate the findings established here to provide the impetus for research into cognitive-level explanations of group bonding and extreme pro-group behaviour across a diverse range of social groups.