A growing amount of attention has been paid to the topic of dehumanization of professional athletes in recent years, both in mainstream media and in academic literature. Even professional athletes themselves have begun speaking out on the issue. Nevertheless, the academic scholarship on this phenomenon remains sparse, with scholars yet to provide empirical evidence that sport fans do, in fact, dehumanize professional athletes. The current research fills this void by exploring fans’ implicit tendencies to view professional athletes as both machines and animals, with a particular emphasis on...Read more
