Abstract
Sports fans are known to engage in BIRGing, or basking in reflected glory after their team wins, and CORFing, cutting off reflected failure following a team loss. These phenomena are related to social identity theory, which examines how group memberships shape a person's self-image. This chapter explores how media-attentive sports fans internalize victory and externalize defeat by charting the simultaneous developments in the 1970s of social identity theory, advanced by European social psychologists, and BIRGing and CORFing, which are rooted in a landmark study on college students wearing school-identifying apparel after the university football team won. The chapter also examines how social identity has served and can continue to be utilized as the theoretical backbone for research on mass-mediated sports fandom.
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