Onset of coherent attitude layers in a population of sports fans

TL;DR

This study models how sports fans develop coherent attitudes in response to referee decisions, revealing phase transitions and layered coherence in opinions, emotions, and actions through empirical analysis and adapted quantum statistical physics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of quantum statistical physics models to social phenomena, specifically analyzing collective attitude formation among sports fans.

Findings

Fans exhibit phase transition behavior with destabilization of neutral states.

Coherent attitude layers form in opinion, emotional, and action spaces.

Strong collective behavior and high integration within fan groups were observed.

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to empirically investigate the behavior of fans, globally coupled to a common environmental source of information. The environmental stimuli were given in a form of referee's decisions list. The sample of fans had to respond on each stimulus by associating points signifying his/her own opinion, emotion and action that referee's decisions provoke. Data were fitted by the Brillouin function which was a solution of an adapted model of quantum statistical physics to social phenomena. Correlation and a principal component analysis were performed in order to detect any collective behavior of the social ensemble of fans. Results showed that fans behaved as a system subject to a phase transition where the neutral state in the opinion, emotional and action space has been destabilized and a new stable state of coherent attitudes was formed. The enhancement of fluctuations and the increase of social susceptibility (responsiveness) to referee's decisions were connected to the first few decisions. The subsequent reduction of values in these parameters signified the onset of coherent layering within the attitude space of the social ensemble of fans. In the space of opinions fan coherence was maximal as only one layer of coherence emerged. In the emotional and action spaces the number of coherent levels was 2 and 4 respectively. The principal component analysis revealed a strong collective behavior and a high degree of integration within and between the opinion, emotional and action spaces of the sample of fans. These results point to one possible way of how different proto-groups, violent and moderate, may be formed as a consequence of global coupling to a common source of information.