The Morality of Forceful Sports: Coordinating Rules, Harm, and Entertainment

Watching contact sports, third parties accept and enjoy that one adult intentionally harms another. Despite the popularity of contact sports, their moral psychology is not easily explained by leading theories of moral intuitions and moral disengagement. Here, we offer the Coordination View, which proposes that people evaluate acts of force by balancing their general prohibition against force against concerns about the rules, harm caused, and entertainingness. Participants watched videos of forceful acts in sports and provided perceptions, evaluations, and reasoning. In three studies, participants evaluated forceful acts more positively when the acts aligned with the rules, were perceived as less harmful, and were rated as more entertaining. In Study 3, participants with more positive attitudes toward violence gave more positive evaluations of force acts they saw as harmful. The findings validated a paradigm for studying the widespread judgments that some acts of force, while harmful, are both entertaining and okay.