How Australians and New Zealanders feel about each other's sporting teams

Professor Robert O'Shea
Discipline of Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University

1:30 (NSW time)
Friday, 25 March 2011

Lecture Hall D350 (Coffs Harbour campus)
Video-linked to Lecture Hall P158 (Lismore campus) and to A223 (Tweed Heads Gold Coast Riverside campus)

"Imagine it's the World Cup of Cricket. Australia was knocked out in the quarter-finals. The final is between New Zealand and England. Which team would you cheer for?"

My colleagues and I asked essentially this question of Australian university students. We also asked similar questions of New Zealand students as a way of exploring the attitudes of people in one country about the sporting teams of the other. We found that Australians are generally positive about New Zealand teams whereas New Zealanders are polarised: some are positive to Australian teams; others are negative, with few taking the middle ground.

In a second study we found that attitude to another country's sporting teams is predicted by the likelihood of that country's being seen as similar to one's own. I will argue that these results reflect principles of social identity, the importance of sport to the cultures of the two countries, and how Australians and New Zealanders see each other.

Professor O'Shea earned a BSc Honours and a PhD, both in Psychology, from the University of Queensland. Before coming to Southern Cross University in 2009, he held positions at University of Otago, Queen's University, Northwestern University, Dalhousie University, University of Rochester, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and University of Leipzig.

Professor O'Shea has published five books in various editions, 11 book chapters, and more than 45 papers in high-impact, international, refereed journals.He served as Associate Editor of the international journal Perception & Psychophysics, and is currently the editor of the Vision category of Scholarpedia.

In 2004, he organized the 31st Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference.

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