Abstract

With the appearance of the mass media, soccer has turned into a mass spectacle. Unfortunately it has coincided with the worst manifestations of violence in modern sports. It has been argued that this kind of behavior could be related to the spectacle itself and its handling by the mass media. The purpose of this doctoral thesis was to analyze, for the first time, the impact of the mass media on spectators’ moral functioning, aggressiveness, and meta-perception of goal orientation.
This research is organized in two main parts. In part one there is a theoretical framework. The second part includes methods, design, analysis, results and the conclusion of the four empirical studies. The participants were college students from two different countries who filled out various questionnaires to evaluate the time they spent in viewing soccer sport programming, the meta-perceptions of goal orientation, the moral functioning and aggressiveness. This data was used in the study I in order to adapt and validate two instruments capable to assess these variables. In study II it was observed that meta-perception of ego orientation mediates between the viewing of sport programming about soccer and the moral functioning of spectators. In the study III was determined the influence of gender and the viewing of soccer matches on the aggressiveness and moral functioning of spectators. It was observed that viewing soccer matches had a negative effect on aggressiveness and moral functioning of spectators, especially in males. Finally, the study IV provided evidence supporting that those participants who watched a five minutes video with aggression and violent behaviors images manifested higher levels of physical and verbal aggression and rage than the participants not exposed to such video.