The New Psychology of Sport and Exercise

The Social Identity Approach

S Alexander Haslam, Katrien Fransen, Filip Boen, S Alexander Haslam, Katrien Fransen, Filip Boen

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529737493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología aplicada

?The Roger Federer, the Steffi Graf, the Usain Bolt of all books about the psychology of sport, packed with insight and wisdom' -Brian Viner, Sports writer and author of Pelé, Ali, Lillee, and Me

Thisis the first textbook to explore and explainthe contribution ofsocial groups and social identityto all aspects ofsports and exercise— from leadership, motivation and communication to mental health, teamwork, and fan behaviour. In the context of increasingrecognition ofthe importance ofgroup processesfor athletic performance, engagement in exercise and the business of sport, this book offers a new way ofunderstanding, researching and practicing sport and exercise psychology

Written by aninternationalteam of researchers at the cutting edge of efforts to apply social identity principles to the world of sport and exercise, this will bean essential resource for students, teachers and practitioners who are keen to be at the forefront of thinking and practice.

Section 1 Introduction

1 Towards a new psychology of sport and exercise

Filip Boen

Katrien Fransen

S. Alexander Haslam

I have always believed that exercise is a key not only to physical health but to peace of mind. […] In my letters to my children, I regularly urged them to exercise, to play some fast-moving sport like basketball, soccer or tennis to take their mind off whatever might be bothering them. While I was not always successful with my children, I did manage to influence some of my more sedentary colleagues. Exercise was unusual for African men of my age and generation. After a while even Walter (Sisulu) began to take a few turns around the courtyard in the morning. I know that some of my younger comrades looked at me and said to themselves: ‘If that old man can do it, why can’t I?’ They, too, began to exercise. (Mandela, 1994, p. 584)

The above quote is taken from Long Road to Freedom – the autobiography of Nelson Mandela in which, among other things, he writes about the 28 years he was held in detention on Robben Island for being a member of the African National Congress (ANC), at that time a banned organisation that was committed to opposing South Africa’s Apartheid regime. It illustrates two important points about physical activity. First, it shows how physical exercise helped the man who would go on to become president remain mentally and physically healthy over the course of his prolonged imprisonment. Long before regular physical activity was being systematically promoted by health services around the world, Mandela recognised its importance not only for his own well-being, but also for the well-being of his ‘more sedentary’ colleagues.

Second, the quote also speaks to the way in which physical activity is shaped by social group membership. As Mandela points out, at the time, exercise was not a normative behaviour for African men of his age (and despite the increasing evidence and awareness of its benefits, it has not yet become so). At the same time, Mandela notes that he was more successful in convincing his fellow prisoners than his own children. Why would this be the case? Is it because he was more charismatic as a political leader than as a father? Is it because he could directly model his physical activity for his inmates and party members, but not for his children? Either way, it speaks to an interesting dynamic that centres on group membership and social interaction.

After he had been released from prison and become the president of post-Apartheid South Africa, Mandela was the architect of a far more momentous sporting achievement – bringing South Africans together around support for their national rugby team, the Springboks (Carlin, 2008). The Springboks had previously been spurned by the black majority because they were a symbol of white supremacy and Apartheid. So when Mandela decided to publicly present himself as a fan of the Springboks, he was taking a big risk. But the risk paid off when the Springboks unexpectedly qualified for the 1995 Rugby World Cup final. Before that final, the team visited Robben Island and became inspired by the unshaken spirit and conviction that Mandela and his fellow prisoners had shown during their long imprisonment. Moreover, in the final they were able draw on that defiant spirit to overcome the New Zealand All Blacks, the clear favourites, and become world champions. After this David-versus-Goliath victory, black and white South Africans celebrated together on the streets, and Mandela’s dream of a united nation was realised, at least in that moment (see also Chapters 2 and 20).

On the one hand, this story is another example of Mandela’s unique and legendary capacity to shape the will of others. On the other hand, though, it again shows how individuals’ sporting preferences and choices are a reflection of the groups to which these individuals belong. It was only when they saw the national team as an embodiment of a shared identity (as ‘us South Africans’ rather than ‘us white South Africans’) that all South Africans came out to support it.

The more general point here, then, is that as with all behaviour, sport and physical activity (in all its forms) is shaped by the complex interplay between individual, social and contextual factors. Interestingly, though, when Stuart Biddle and Nanette Mutrie (2001) reproduced Mandela’s quote in the first edition of their ground-breaking textbook Psychology of Physical Activity, they used it (and, in particular, the lines ‘If that old man can do it, why can’t I?’) to underline the point that personal feelings of competence and confidence (i.e., a sense of self-efficacy) are central to people’s willingness to engage in physical activity. The quote was absent from later editions, but the focus on individual-level explanations of physical activity and sport remained. Indeed, research in sport and exercise psychology has generally tended to see the individual as the primary unit of psychological analysis and the group as an external factor that merely provides a context for the thoughts, emotions and behaviour of individuals.

As we will see in the chapters below, it is clear too that this individualistic perspective has spawned a broad range of empirical and theoretical advances. Yet even though recognition of social and environmental influences on individual psychology has increased over time (e.g., in ecological models of sport psychology; Sallis & Owen, 2002), something is still clearly missing. In particular, there has been a failure to come to terms with the psychological reality of the group – the fact that when athletes, fans and commentators talk about ‘us’ (e.g., ‘us Lakers fans’, ‘us cyclists’), their psychology is not that of the person as an individual but the psychology of the person as a group member. Importantly, this does not denote just a transformation of perception (so that the person comes to see the world through the lens of a given group membership), but also a transformation of behaviour, so that they now behave, and are capable of behaving, as a group member rather than just as an individual (Turner, 1982). And, as we will also see, this transformation in turn is bound up with a whole range of social influence processes that centre on this internalised sense of group membership – such things as leadership, communication, organisation and teamwork.

In recognition of this gap in the field, recent years have witnessed a dramatic growth of interest in social psychological theories that argue for the distinctive contribution of groups to sport and exercise-related behaviour (Rees, Haslam, Coffee, & Lavallee, 2015; Stevens et al., 2017). Indeed, informed by insights from social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987; also referred to as the social identity approach; Haslam, 2001), this has given rise to what can be heralded as a new psychology of sport and exercise. This places group processes and the psychology that gives rise to them centre stage. More particularly, it argues that group processes are central to most, if not all, aspects of sport and exercise (and many other domains besides). Moreover, these group processes are fundamentally grounded in people’s capacity to define themselves in terms of their social identity – that is, their sense of themselves as group members. Social identity, then, is the psychological force that transforms what would otherwise be just a collection of disparate individuals into a meaningful group with a distinct focus, energy and power. It turns lone wolves into a pack, solitary souls into missionary movements, a team of champions into a champion team.

Given how central both groups and group life are to sport, one might expect that social identity theorists would have had a long-standing interest in questions of sport and exercise psychology, and that sport and exercise psychologists would have had a long-standing interest in questions of social identity. However, as we noted in the Preface, the fact is that they haven’t. Indeed, we noted there that it is this that makes the psychological analysis that we present in this volume ‘new’.

Nevertheless, as we also noted in the Preface, in recent years a large and impressive body of research has quickly built up that has started to bring the study of social identity and sport together and to life (see Figure P.1). Much (perhaps most) of this work has been conducted by contributors to this book. Importantly, though, it has never been systematically integrated into one volume. Neither has it been placed alongside more mainstream empirical work and theory in a text that clarifies, compares and evaluates the different approaches that students, researchers and practitioner scan take to the core topics of sport and exercise psychology.

This, then, is the key gap that the present volume seeks to fill. Its core goal is to flesh out the social identity approach with a view to helping readers understand and appreciate the complex relations between physical activity, exercise and sports on the one hand, and social identity processes and group phenomena on the other. In the process, it seeks to show that this is much more than just a marriage of convenience. That is, it is not simply the case that social identity should be ‘of interest’ to sport and exercise psychologists, and that sport and exercise should be ‘of interest’ to social identity theorists. Much more adventurously, we want to show that social identity is an indispensable construct for sport and exercise psychology and that sport and exercise is a particularly powerful domain in which to test and elaborate social identity theorising.

In the process of setting out on this adventure, this introductory chapter will first provide some conceptual clarifications of the concepts of physical activity, exercise and sport. After this, we provide a brief historical overview of the emergence of sport and exercise psychology as distinct scientific subdisciplines. We then make a more focused case for the importance of a social identity approach to sport and exercise psychology.

Physical Activity, Exercise and Sport: Definition and Conceptual Clarification

Given that there are so many misconceptions about the terms sport, exercise and physical activity, especially in daily life, it is essential that we first provide clear operational definitions of these key terms. In line with most prevailing conceptualisations (Biddle, Mutrie, & Gorely, 2015), we consider physical activity to be an umbrella term that includes all types of movement. More specifically, the well-accepted definition by Carl Caspersen and colleagues sees physical activity as a movement of the body that has three characteristics: (a) it is produced by the skeletal muscles (to distinguish it from more automatically generated movements, such as blinking your eyes); (b) it results in energy expenditure which varies from low to high (to include light forms of movement, such as walking); and (c) it has a positive correlation with physical fitness (which is defined as people’s ability to perform physical activity; Casperen, Powell, & Christenson, 1985). In order to lead to positive health outcomes and thus to be considered to be Health-Enhancing Physical Activity (often abbreviated as HEPA), energy expenditure is usually required to be well above resting levels, and, where this is the case, it is referred to as ‘Moderate-to-Vigorous’ Physical Activity (MVPA).

Exercise can be seen as a specific subset of physical activity, as it satisfies all three conditions of the foregoing definition, but requires that activity to have a strong positive relationship with physical activity. This reflects the fact that physical activity can only be considered to be exercise when it involves planned, structured and repetitive bodily movement with the explicit objective of maintaining or improving physical fitness (e.g., by using the treadmill in the gym). Nevertheless, there is clearly overlap between these concepts, and the distinction between exercise and physical activity is not always clear-cut. For example, if a person deliberately uses a bike instead of a car to go shopping, and with his or her health in mind, are they exercising or only engaging in physical activity?

Sport is a specific subset of physical activity, but it is even more tricky to define. Nevertheless, this is often done by identifying additional characteristics that differentiate sport from physical activity (and sometimes exercise). For example, in one widely accepted definition, Jack Rejeski and Lawrence Brawley (1988) identified seven of these, noting that sport is (a) rule governed, (b) structured, and (c) competitive, and involves (d) gross motor movement as well as (e) strategy, (f) skills, and (g) chance. It follows, however, that not all sports are health-enhancing (e.g., darts), and that while there is considerable overlap with the concept of exercise, much depends on the meaning of ‘competitive’ (e.g., is the competition with another person, with a group or with themselves?). For example, should jogging on your own with the goal of beating your previous best time be considered exercise or sport? It is not always clear either whether the movement that an activity involves is gross enough to qualify as sport. This, for example, is an issue that is often discussed in the context of debates about whether e-sports, fishing or snooker are ‘really’ sports.

Despite these conceptual ambiguities, the above definitions provide a framework that can be helpful when it comes to distinguishing between the typical manifestations of physical activity, exercise and sport. At the same time, though, the fact that it is possible for people to have different views about the appropriate categorisation for a given activity tells us at least three things. First, that, as with all categorization, in practice there is a strong subjective dimension to these definitions and distinctions (Oakes, Haslam, & Turner, 1994). Nevertheless, second, this subjectivity is structured such that it is often a reflection of the shared group memberships of perceivers. In particular, those who participate in a given form of exercise or sport are typically much more likely to extol its virtues than those who do not. Cheerleaders, for example, have been keen to have their activity recognised as a sport, while outsiders have tried to deny them this recognition (on moral and philosophical grounds; Johnson & Sailors, 2013). Related to these points, third, there are higher-order definitional and conceptual issues that prescriptive attempts to define exercise and sport overlook. In particular, if we reflect on George Orwell’s (1945) view (discussed in the Preface) that sport is ‘war minus the shooting’, it is clear that he was trying to capture something about the nature of sporting competition as intense, engaging and, above all, grounded in collective loyalties and identifications.

One of the key goals of the present volume is to tune in to these collective dimensions of physical activity, exercise and sport. In so doing, we look to explain not only why these dimensions have definitional and conceptual relevance, but also why and how they structure people’s actual engagement with the activity in question. And as well as allowing us to explore the ‘big picture’ issues that Orwell raises (e.g., concerning politics and sport; see Chapters 2 and 20), this allows us to answer much more fundamental questions – such as why people engage in sport and exercise at all.

Sport and Exercise Psychology: History and Future

According to the American Psychological Association (2019), sport and exercise psychology involves ‘the scientific study of the psychological factors that are associated with participation and performance in sport, exercise, and other types of physical activity’. In line with this mission, there are two main goals that...