Moral Action in Sport: A Journey of 20 Years

Activity: Academic and Industrial eventsGuest lecture or Invited talk

Description


Sport is replete of behaviors that can have positive or negative consequences for others’ rights and psychological and physical well-being. Some examples are helping an opponent off the floor, encouraging a teammate after a mistake, which are prosocial behaviors, but also cheating and verbally abusing or physically hurting one’s teammates and opponents, which are antisocial behaviors. I use the term moral behavior to collectively refer to such acts. In this talk, I will discuss highlights of the research I have conducted in the past twenty years on moral behavior in sport. First, I will define moral behavior, offer a brief historical overview of the field, and discuss my first steps in this area of research. Second, I will discuss antecedents of moral behavior, with a particular focus on moral disengagement. Next, I will present my research on bracketed morality, in which I tried to understand variation in moral behavior of student-athletes between school and sport and the factors that could explain this variation. Then, I will turn my attention to cross-sectional and experimental research on achievement-related consequences of teammate behavior for the recipient. Finally, I will present my intervention work aimed to prevent doping, which is a cheating behavior, as it breaks the rules of sport. I will conclude with practical implications and future research directions.
Period23 Sept 2018
Held atGhent University, Belgium
Degree of RecognitionInternational