The spillover effects of fairness events in competitive sports events on audience social trust: a quasi natural experimental analysis
Chuanyong Zhang, Meiling Zhou · 2026
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Description
Chuanyong Zhang and Meiling Zhou ask whether a cheating scandal on the field can shake trust far beyond the stadium. Their frame treats sport as a stand-in signal for institutions: clear rules, public enforcement, and checkable outcomes let spectators update beliefs cheaply. The team merged national survey data with social media text and ran trust game experiments.
From four hundred eighty-six candidate incidents they coded sixty-three fairness events, split into regulative, procedural, and substantive kinds. Procedural fouls, biased process rather than broken rules, spilled over hardest, roughly three times harder than regulative ones. The damage faded stepwise from the officiating crew outward to strangers, while close ties stayed untouched. The authors find the signal pathway carries about half the effect, ahead of moral shock and media reach.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Chuanyong Zhang, Meiling Zhou |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 78 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |