description
In the past decade, multiple actors in the sports community collaborated to contribute to a safe(r) sports environment for each athlete. Their emphasis has been mostly put on physical and sexual violence towards athletes. As a result, the disclosure of these practices has increased the sports community’s awareness. However, violent practices on a psychological level are likely to remain underexposed, especially, since these practices are often more intangible given the lack of physical contact with the athlete. Therefore, psychologically violent practices targeted at athletes and their effects on athletes should come (more) to light.
The psychological harm to athletes caused by these practices can be intentionally conducted by the doer, and thus, being aware of the consequence caused by the actions (e.g., name-calling, degrading comments, belittling). However, the doer can also be unaware of the consequences, and thus, have an unintentional motive to psychologically harm the athlete (e.g., being (extremely) critical, telling embarrassing stories about the athletes, spreading rumours). Despite their intentions, both are wrong and should be prevented. However, it could be that preventing psychological harm to athletes resulting from different motives could be targeted through different approaches. But how to do so?
Perspective-taking is an important psychological mechanism of humans to understand how a situation appears to another person and how this affects the interaction with this person. A person who is able to look beyond their own points of view is more likely to succeed in considering how someone else might think or feel about something. Therefore, insights into possible consequences of a person’s actions can be obtained and psychological harm can be prevented in sports.
Research question
Several studies in other fields of psychology (e.g., autism, stigmatization, stereotypes) have shown positive significant results of perspective-taking tasks. Thus, we are interested in exploring the effects of perspective-taking task on preventing psychological harm to athletes contributing to safe sports.
Research method
To safely explore this, technology – specifically VR – will be used to develop scripts to explore perspective-taking tasks. The idea is to include two perspectives in one script: the athlete’s perspective and the other person’s (e.g., a coach, parent or peer). In this script, an interaction between these two actors during practice will be simulated.
Data-analysis
The data of this study will be analysed by quantitative and qualitative data analysis programmes such as SPSS or R.
INFORMATION
Please contact Lynn Weiher (l.weiher@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. This assignment is open to one student.
Literature
Mado, M., Herrera, F., Nowak, K., & Bailenson, J. (2021). Effect of virtual reality perspective-taking on related and unrelated contexts. Cyberpsychology, Behaviour, and Social Networking, 24(12), 839-845. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.0802
Herrera, F., Bailenson, J., Weisz, E., Ogle, E., & Zaki, J. (2018). Building long-term empathy: a large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking. PLoS One, 13(10), e0204494. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204494