Disentangling the Relations between Social Identity and Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior in Competitive Youth Sport

Abstract

The social identities formed through membership on extracurricular activity groups may contribute to the frequency with which youth engage in prosocial and antisocial behavior. However, researchers have yet to disentangle the individual- and group-level processes social identification effects operate through; sex and perceived norms may also moderate such effects. Thus, we investigated the hierarchical and conditional relations between three dimensions of social identity (i.e., ingroup ties, cognitive centrality, ingroup affect) and prosocial and antisocial behavior in youth ice hockey players (N = 376; 33% female). Multilevel analyses demonstrated antisocial teammate and opponent behavior were predicted by cognitive centrality at the team level. Further, prosocial teammate behavior was predicted by cognitive centrality and ingroup ties at the individual-level. Also, perceived norms for prosocial teammate behavior moderated the relations between ingroup ties, cognitive centrality, and ingroup affect and prosocial teammate behaviour. Finally, sex moderated the relations between cognitive centrality/ingroup affect and antisocial opponent behavior. This work demonstrates the multilevel and conditional nature of how social identity dimensions relate to youth prosocial and antisocial behavior.

Prosocial and antisocial behaviour in sport

“…The latter was most frequent when participants experienced high antisocial combined with low prosocial behaviour from their teammates. In other work, athletes who perceived that their teammates engaged in more antisocial behaviours toward one another during practices, also reported more antisocial behaviour toward their teammates (Benson, Bruner, & Eys, 2017;Bruner et al, 2018).…”

“…More recent research has identified variables that are linked only to teammate behaviour, for example descriptive norms and social identity (e.g. Bruner et al, 2018). Descriptive norms refer to the degree to which one's teammates act prosocially (or antisocially) toward other members of their team.…”

Factorial Invariance, Latent Mean Differences of the Panas and Affective Profiles and Its Relation to Social Anxiety in Ecuadorian Sample

“…Taking the distinction of affective dimensions, several studies have related them to aspects that are part of the psychological and emotional wellbeing of humans [5][6][7], such as life satisfaction, perfectionism or emotional intelligence, among others [8][9][10][11][12][13]. However, due to the fact that current research has identified that the associations of the TME do not consistently fit with all anxiety disorders and clinicians are working on improving the use of the model [14], the number of studies that analyze the relation between affect and social anxiety has increased during the last years.…”

Adaptation and Validation of the Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior Scale in Sports for the Spanish Context

“…Sometimes the result is aggressive and violent behavior, an excessive desire to win, and other socially undesirable qualities [3]. For this reason, Kavussanu and Boardley [2] created the Scale of Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior in Sports to measure such behaviors in the sports context, a scale that has been successfully applied in multiple studies [4,5]. In the Spanish context, there are currently no instruments for assessing prosocial and antisocial behavior in sport.…”