This isn’t a moral debate — it’s a call for curiosity and harm reduction.
If drugs are part of the fan experience for some, ignoring it won’t make it safer.
Let’s talk evidence, not stigma.
📖 Full paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
So why the silence?
Is it because football fans in the UK have long been under media & policing scrutiny, while American fandom is treated as more commercial, polished, and contained?
US: 22% fans reported using drugs at a game, and 76% saw others take drugs.
But unlike the UK, drug use didn’t vary by sport — basketball, baseball, hockey fans behaving similarly.
UK: 6.5% of fans said they’d taken drugs at a game in the past year. ⚽ 60% had seen others doing so. Cocaine use among football & rugby fans was twice the national average and greater than in cricket.
🧵 New research alert: Recreational drug use among sports fans — UK 🇬🇧 vs US 🇺🇸
Just published in Journal of Sport & Social Issues.
Why almost no one in the US is talking about this?
#SportsResearch #DrugPolicy #HarmReduction #FanCulture #SocialScience
Local rivalries can ripple out to affect cohesion at the national level.
Raises big questions for ethnicity, religion, class, politics & beyond.
Huge thanks to @MBilgehanAytac & Linus Peitz — and to Türkiye for hosting this study!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Participants saw Turkish national team line-ups with more or fewer players from their own vs. rival clubs.
- National bonding dropped when rival clubs were overrepresented
-Stronger national bonding → more prosociality
- More rivals on the team reduced prosociality
New paper! ⚽🔥
We tested how local ties (loyalty to one’s football club) shape broader ties (connection to the national team). Where better than Türkiye, home to some of the world’s most passionate rivalries? 🇹🇷
Whether it’s gang violence or helping a stranger, group bonding shapes action.
Time to reframe how we understand social ties in criminogenic & prosocial contexts. Read the article: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Our framework bridges criminology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
We call for more dialogue: crime science needs fusion theory—and fusion research needs crime scholars to tackle moral & social harms.
Fusion isn't "bad" or "good". It's powerful. People fused to their group may commit crimes for it—or make deep sacrifices for others. This has huge implications for how we study & prevent crime. 🧠
🚨 New paper out: What if extreme criminal and prosocial acts shared the same root cause?
We explore how identity fusion—where personal & group identities merge—can help explain violence, loyalty, & desistance.
From Glastonbury to the Euros, we’re wired to come together — to celebrate, grieve, chant, cry.
Euphoric AND dysphoric rituals matter.
Here’s a quick reflection from my time at Nudgestock
🎥 youtu.be/GGIqHuWvrG4
What collective moment has moved you recently?
Time and outstanding staff are needed for both; invest in strong community programmes and supporting staff. Full article: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
🤝Attachment to coaches → immediate bonding & sustained group identification
Whilst both strengthen social bonds, they work differently over time.
Our findings highlight the power of community interventions for building positive social identities in prison.
Our latest study on the Twinning Project explores how the strong, positive social identities needed for desistance from crime can form through #football in #prison...
Key findings from 454 participants in prison:
🦋Personal transformation → deeper change & lasting identity fusion
A focus on shared depth might be what it takes to close the empathy gap.
Full article here: bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
It's not about the specific story you tell. It's about helping others feel that you’ve been changed by something—and ideally, that they have too.
Shared transformation, not shared trauma, is the real glue.
In a final study, analyses showed that it's less about WHAT happened—football, prison, death—but that something deeply transformative occurred internally, and both people recognised it.
That sense of shared transformation was enough to bridge differences—even criminal history.
In both countries, identity fusion (a deep sense of connection) predicted whether people were willing to hire someone who’d been to prison. But what triggered that fusion was culturally shaped. Sport in the emotionally repressed UK; bereavement (and overt feelings?!) in the US
Across four studies, we found...
🇬🇧 Brits who saw football as transformative felt more bonded with prisoners who were also football fans—especially when they'd endured tough defeats.
🇺🇸 In the US, it was personal loss & adversity (like death) that did the bonding work.
Can people feel bonded to someone who is heavily stigmatised (like a formerly incarcerated person) if they believe that person has gone through something deeply life-changing?
The answer: Yes—but culture matters. A lot. 🧵
Great opportunity for a #psychology #PhD student from the The British Psychological Society and POST to have 13 weeks+ in Parliament with a generous £7,900 stipend!
post.parliament.uk/british-psyc...
Interview in the Sunday Times...
Fitness and wellbeing are no longer just about feeling good: looking good has also become a marker of discipline, value, even — perhaps most worryingly — virtue. www.thetimes.com/life-style/f...
Who's watching #severance? I gave an interview to @sciam.bsky.social on the show's psychology www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...
Great to be part of this series for @BBCSounds...a mix of lived experience from the fans, old footage and I'm chuffed that a psychology/evolutionary take made its way in! Why have 400 fights in a lifetime over #football?!
For answers, listen on BBC Sounds: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
Brilliant idea!
Free here for 50 days: authors.elsevier.com/c/1kbyf3tz49...
After that: doi.org/10.1016/j.ev...
Could this help explain why football can unite people and fuel intense rivalries? Huge thanks to fantastic colleagues on this, led by Tiago Bortolini
#Psychology #Football
✅ Synchrony made both ingroups & outgroups see the chanters as more formidable.
❌ But it didn’t make outgroups see them as more threatening.
🧐 ‘Fused’ fans who perceived rivals to be more threatening tended to engage in more outgroup hostility, even at a cost to self.