Abstract:
The spectacle of sports in America has consistently been shown to be a financial powerhouse (PwC, 2019). However, when there is a huge potential for financial gain, there also comes the risk of a huge potential financial loss. When athletes commit an act that is deemed offensive or inappropriate, there is the possibility to incur millions of dollars in lost revenue (Rishe, 2016). So, understanding the most successful way at safeguarding or repairing the image of an athlete is important. However, the image repair process is not as simple as it may seem. Therefore, this dissertation empirically investigated how one’s own identity influenced their reactions to the athlete image repair process. Using both Social Identity Theory and Image Repair Theory, this study explored how better understanding the identity of an audience could also lead to better understanding of the success of image repair strategies. A national sample of 368 individuals participated in an online posttest only experiment. During the experiment, participants were randomly assigned to view one of eight message conditions. Following this, participants responded to a series of questions assessing account acceptability, athlete likeability, likelihood to repeat the act, willingness to share negative word of mouth (nWOM), role model perceptions, and supportive behavior of the athlete. Results supported previous IRT literature in showing the mortification strategy to be the most successful strategy at repairing an athlete’s image, Black participants actually rated athletes that used the denial strategy to be more likeable. Race was also seen to be a strong indicator for how each race condition viewed the athlete in terms of likelihood to repeat the act with White participants believing that the athlete in question was more likely to repeat the act than Black participants or Other participants. White participants also showed slight in-group favoritism towards the White athlete. Another interesting finding was that White participants were more likely to share negative word of mouth about a White athlete regardless of response strategy used and regardless of gender. When looking at how gender impacted the image repair process, it was found that overall, male participants were more likely to accept the account of female athletes, consider female athletes to be more likeable than the male athletes, and believe female athletes were less likely to recommit the crime.
