A few years ago, Weatherhead professor of public policy Todd Rogers observed that pervasive loneliness, political intolerance, and polarization all seemed to stem from a fragmenting social fabric. He began to wonder how existing social dynamics could be harnessed to help people connect. Then he read Fans Have More Friends, a book by David Sikorjak and Ben Valenta whose title does a good job of summarizing its central thesis—namely that, as its authors write, “being a sports fan is good for you, good for others, and good for society.”
“Oh my god,” thought Rogers. “That’s exactly it.”
When sports fans gather to engage in the lively collective rituals that support and celebrate their favorite teams—think of Knicks fans going feral during and after the NBA Finals, or passionate Norwegians shouting “Ro!” in the style of Vikings every time they won World Cup matches—they are united in a kind of totemic ceremony. “The energy of chanting and attending and focusing together,” says Rogers, who is a hardcore fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, transforms individuals into a community. “That’s exactly what we do in stadiums with teams, and that is what we do with our friends when we watch games together. The totem is the team.”
Since then, Rogers and Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) doctoral student Audrey Feldman have authored a study analyzing, among other things, how belonging to the same sports fandom may reduce hostile attitudes across partisan divides. According to their findings, being a fan of the same team as someone who holds different political views increases feelings of mutual warmth while reducing political polarization. What’s more, these benefits are greater among those who care more about their teams. The more passionate the fan, the stronger the depolarizing effect.
Being a fan of the same team increases feelings of mutual warmth. And across partisan divides, the more passionate the fan, the stronger the depolarizing effect.
In an ever-fragmented country where 76 percent of the population reports being a fan of at least one team among the three major sports leagues, work like Rogers’s and Feldman’s promises high impact: it points to a broad target for scalable social action. With funding support from FOX Sports, Rogers has launched the Fandom and Social Connection Initiative, an HKS project “studying how to harness sports fandom to strengthen relationships, build community, and reduce social disconnection.”
A promising strategy to reap the social benefits of fandom may be to encourage fans to come together and watch sporting events with others. Although 100 million people watch NFL games every week, says Rogers, 50 million tend to watch them alone. Rogers has developed a “light intervention” by which fans are encouraged to invite someone to watch a game with them. “Something like 40 percent of people end up watching with others when they would not have otherwise,” he says. “They feel more connected, they enjoy it more than they thought, they spend more time in the company of others, and it persists for future weeks.”
Actively participating in fandoms with others is a powerful social engine, something Rogers attributes to four conditions: fandoms are a reason to gather; they are repeated and ritualized; they are important to how people conceive of their identity; and they provide an easy and accessible topic for conversation. Fandoms may not be the only communities with these characteristics—whenever Rogers discusses the four conditions, almost everybody tells him, “You know what else has those four things? Church.” But according to Rogers’s and Feldman’s research, sports fandoms are more socially ubiquitous. More people spend more time talking about sports and watching games than they spend time talking about religion and attending church.
Rogers’s approach to fandoms may conceive of them as something instrumental: a community to join, not necessarily for its own sake, but rather for the individual and social benefits it might entail. However, it is not Rogers’s intention to persuade people into joining fandoms for some higher political purpose; after all, people are unlikely to become sports fans because they are aware of its depolarizing effects. “But if you say, ‘Be a fan because it’ll bring you closer to the people you care about,’” says Rogers, “then that’s different.”
In the end, Rogers doesn’t have much convincing to do—most people are fans already. Still, his work sheds light on why being part of a fandom can be socially beneficial, and that, he believes, may motivate more people to join one. He shares the story of a neuroscientist friend he spent a long time trying to convince to become a fan. “Your kids will like it. You will like it. It’ll be good for connecting with other people,” Rogers told him. Then the friend decided to become a fan of the Eagles, and that, he later told Rogers, was “the single most surprisingly positive thing he’s chosen to do in the last couple of decades.” Whenever Rogers’s friend wears his Eagles cap, people approach him; he talks about the team at work; and he sits with his kids and watches the games on Sundays. Rogers adds, “It just opened up the social world to him.”
