Abstract
Grounded in the moral conflicts experienced by sports fans when their favored teams are involved in scandal events that violate implicit social contracts, this research develops the sports fan moral consistency maintenance model to explain how fans restore psychological balance and maintain loyalty. Across three experimental studies (N = 1179), we examine the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that shape loyalty recovery in the sports context. Study 1 shows that contractual violations significantly increase cognitive dissonance, which elicits both anger and shame. Study 2 reveals that cognitive dissonance undermines loyalty recovery through anger, while the pathway from shame to loyalty recovery is not significant. Study 3 further shows that fan identification moderates the emotional pathway. Highly identified fans show weaker anger and relatively stronger shame than low-identified fans. This pattern slightly reduces the negative association between anger and loyalty recovery, although the shame-loyalty link itself remains non-significant. These findings indicate that anger is a robust mediator of loyalty loss among sports fans, whereas shame represents a potential but still unconfirmed route to loyalty repair. The proposed model extends the understanding of moral emotion and cognitive dissonance in sports fan behavior and offers new implications for managing team scandals and repairing audience-team relationships.
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [Zhang], upon reasonable request.
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Wanyue XU and Wenhui XU wrote the main manuscript text, and Desheng ZHANG was responsible for analyzing the data. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Xu, W., Xu, W. & Zhang, D. Cognitive dissonance and psychological contract violation in sports fan loyalty under scandal events. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-35507-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-35507-4
