Cheating in a sports media context: Childhood sports experience, moral foundations, and social exchange

This research tests hypotheses regarding media message contexts, interpersonal messages, and moral foundations and the impact on a person's acceptance of cheating in sports. This research utilizes a social exchange approach to sports media message contexts, where written contexts serve as an induction that elicit a cheating detection algorithm that produces a higher score on a logic task. Further, this research suggests that messages regarding sports cheating in youth and adolescence may explain a person's acceptance of cheating in sports. This research reports an original online survey (N = 184) with an experimental component. The experiment varied the written social exchange message context and compared scores in a conditional logic task. The survey asked participants' interpersonal and mediated sports message experiences, as well as the importance of a participants' moral foundation. The results indicate that teammate messages regarding cheating in sports in youth and adolescence and one's importance on the fairness moral foundation predicted acceptability of cheating in sports. Additionally, the social exchange context in a sports media scenario produced a cheating detection response predicted by social exchange theory, but with a novel pattern of the effect compared to traditional social exchange findings. These findings are discussed in light of other theoretical perspectives on morality and sports, and future research directions are discussed.