Abstract
While student-athletes broadly benefit from involvement in intercollegiate sport, student-athletes also have many opportunities to engage in risky behaviors that impact their own health and that of others (e.g., binge drinking, hazing). In the current study, we examined athletes' conformity to their teammates' risky behaviors through an in-situ team-based paradigm, to test the expectation that athletes who strongly socially identify with their team would be at increased risk of conforming to teammates' behaviors. Participants included 379 athletes from 23 intact NCAA teams who completed an electronic survey to complete scale-scored survey items (e.g., social identity) and report the extent they would engage in six scenarios (i.e., binge drinking, marijuana use, drinking/driving, playing through concussion, performance enhancing drug (PED) use, hazing). Researchers then displayed ostensible responses that were manipulated to appear as though teammates participated in highly 'risky' behavior before athletes again responded to the scenarios. Across the sample, post-manipulation scores increased significantly – indicating conformity – for all scenarios (t-values: 6.66-11.27) with the percent of athletes conforming ranging from 12-30%. Using hierarchical mixed-effect models to account for individual- and team-level effects, individual ratings of social identity (level-1) significantly predicted conformity to all risky behaviors except for PED use (b's from .08 to .20), while group-level social identity (level-2) predicted playing through a concussion (b=.34) and drinking/driving (b=-.25). The current results support our hypothesis that social identity plays an important role in conformity to peer-influence and may inform efforts to leverage group-level processes in interventions to prevent risky behaviors in student-athletes.Acknowledgments: 1. This project was funded by an NCAA Graduate Student Research Grant 2. This project was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health Award Number TL1TR002016.