Sport teams' promotion of plant-based food consumption among fans

The study's goal is to examine the downstream relations of fan awareness of a favorite sport team's pro-environmental food initiatives, considering fans with different degrees of team identification. Building upon the Awareness-to-Action Continuum, the authors propose two pathways that may help explain reported plant-based food consumption among fans (i.e. eating vegetables, eating vegan food, and avoiding meat), particularly at high (vs. low) degrees of team identification: team value internalization and fan-team personality match. Study 1 surveyed 799 fans of 12 different sport teams from various countries, which had implemented pro-environmental food initiatives in the past. Study 2 used a survey-experimental design to manipulate identification with one selected team from the U.S. (n = 356 fans) and assessed the downstream relations of fan awareness of the team's pro-environmental food initiatives. The authors control for attitude and subjective norm in their analyses and show that the levels of team identification associate with the relation between fan awareness and reported consumption of plant-based foods via fan-team personality match but not via value internalization. Ironically, the perception of the team's personality as superior to their own personality among low-identification fans is negatively related to the adoption of a plant-based diet despite high awareness levels.