Deviant behavior is any individual or collection
action, thought, or expression that violates either formal
or informal group norms or systems of practice.
Perhaps most important, something becomes defined as deviant within a sport culture only when the behavior is
recognized, labeled, and reacted to as such by an audience.
The violation of official rules governing all facets
of sport participation, and the widespread norms in
sport held among insiders, has been accounted for by
researchers. Typical manifestations of deviance in sport
include unsanctioned inter-personal player violence and
aggression during games, player cheating, abusing
referees and other officials, sexual misconduct and
abuse by athletes and coaches, and sports fan violence
(Atkinson & Young, 2008). Still, in sport studies, deviant
behavior has been almost exclusively associated
with player violence and aggression. Sport violence and
aggression has been examined from a range of biopsychological
theoretical perspectives, and most frequently
accounted for by theories attributing excessive
player frustration, aggressive instinct, or self-perceived
relative deprivation during play to contra-normative
violence and aggression between players. Typical
explanations of player violence and aggression suggest
deviant outbursts during game play are often produced
when athletes are systematically blocked from achieving
their goals, negatively react to intense physical
forms of competition, or momentarily lose control of
their emotional regulation capacities (Collins, 2009).
To this end, understanding athlete cognitive-emotionalinstinctual
motivations to engage deviant behavior in
game situations is critical. Kerr’s (2004) reversal theory
of violence in sport suggests that any athlete, in the
‘wrong’ competitive circumstance, could end up committing
violent acts in sport or elsewhere. Therefore,
most psychological of sport research accounts for how
cognition and action is affected by the interplay
between biology and emotion.
What makes sport deviance particularly troubling to
define and explain is that some acts of deviance might
violate an official rule in sport, but not violate common
beliefs or values as shared by members of a sport’s culture.
While a violently aggressive tackle in soccer
might inflict a painful injury to a player and warrant
severe formal punishment from a league, players often
accept these unfortunate outcomes of competition as
simply ‘part of the game.’ Sport psychologists often
draw on Bandura (1973) in this vein to study how violence
and aggression are actively defined and modeled
by athletes in context with complicated and shifting
sensibilities about right and wrong. Taking into account
how players and coaches are often primary definers and
cultural police officers of what constitutes sport deviance,
then, lines are routinely blurred regarding how
much deviance is tolerable because players seemingly
consent to hyper-masculine and insular cultures of systematic
rule breaking and self-monitoring. While biopsychological
theories account for players’ mental and
emotional states leading to deviant behavior, learning
theories help explain how rule breaking becomes culturally
patterned and almost normative.
