Cultural differences in fan ritual learning: A cross-cultural study of the fan ritual learning process of Americans and East Asians.

摘要

This dissertation examined how Americans and East Asians differ in the fan ritual learning process in which an individual acquires rules and skills through social modeling for generating fan rituals and, thus, he or she is able to enact the rituals that are constructed according to the acquired rules. We proposed that an individual may go through four main stages---exposure, rule formation, construction, and enactment---in the fan ritual learning process. Drawing on the theoretical framework, we developed several hypotheses regarding cultural differences in the functioning of socio-cognitive mechanisms in the fan learning process. In the experiments using two different sports of (American college football and international soccer), we demonstrated that Koreans showed more field-dominant attention and causal attributions for prototyping a fan activity than did Americans. In addition, we found that Americans were more likely to engage in rule-based concept matching whereas Koreans were more likely to engage in family-resemblance concept matching in constructing a new ritual from a presented prototype. We also showed that self-efficacy enhanced the Americans' fan ritual enactments more than those of Koreans, whereas collective efficacy enhanced Koreans' ritual enactments more than those of Americans in a collective fan activity setting. Then, based on these findings, we suggested several theoretical and managerial implications.