Would a Chargers fan give money to a Raiders fan asking for spare change? Would the fan of a college football team stop to help the fan of a rival team who had car trouble?

Two Cal State San Marcos University professors have tried to find answers to those questions in an ongoing study that could be completed this year, and so far they’ve learned a few things about fandom and human behavior.

Business professors Vassilis Dalakas and Ben Cherry conducted their first study in November of 2012, when Cherry posed for two days as a panhandler in Mission Valley, changing every hour into a shirt that had a Chargers logo, a Raiders logo or was blank.

“In all honesty, we thought that the novelty in the way of collecting data was very appealing to us,” Dalakas said.


The experiment resulted in situations not usually encountered during academic research.

“I would have people yell things at me,” said Cherry, who besides teaching entrepreneurialism is the faculty athletic representative and chair of the Intercollegiate Athletic Committee.

Some people driving pass yelled “Chargers, yes!” when they saw him in the San Diego shirt. When he panhandled in an Oakland shirt, some people yelled “Raiders suck” or “That’s what you get for being a Raiders fan.”

“I was very nervous when he was wearing the Raiders shirt,” said Dalakas, who watched Cherry from a distance.


“I think it’s interesting how fan-identification spills over beyond the stadium, beyond the sporting context,” Cherry said. “I mean, I’m standing on a street corner. There’s no football happening. And yet somebody’s identifying with what I’m wearing and either responding positively or negatively.”

Some people gave food from a nearby In ‘n’ Out and the professors calculated its cash value when adding up donations. The cash was given to Brother Benno’s charity, and Cherry ate the burgers.

After two days on the street, Cherry had collected $4.57 while wearing a Raiders shirt, $17.11 while wearing a blank shirt and $17.81 while wearing a Chargers shirt.

In research terms, Dalakas said they saw the “out-group bias” against the Raiders, but not the “in-group favoritism” toward the Chargers.


Neither professor knows why, but Dalakas speculated that the stigma of homelessness could have played a role, with San Diego fans turned off by a panhandler wearing their team’s logo.

The findings were presented at the 2013 World Congress of Sociology of Sport in Vancouver, but the professors saw that the unclear results exposed some room for improvement.

A follow-up study was conducted by Cherry in the summer of 2013, when he was teaching an international summer session in Austria. Many of his students happened to be from the University of Georgia.

In the study, Cherry had photographed his wife, Julie, wearing a gray shirt and looking in need of help while standing next to a car with its hood up. In one photo, the gray shirt was changed to have a University of Georgia bulldog mascot. In another photo, the shirt had a gator, mascot of the rival University of Florida.


In an initial classroom survey, most of the students said they would stop to help her while she was wearing a bulldog logo, but wouldn’t if she wore a gator shirt.

“It blows my mind that the shirt I’m wearing somehow tells something to somebody that would make them not want to help me,” he said. “I think that’s the story of the Raiders/Chargers. It’s not that the Chargers shirt makes me want to help you more, it’s that the Raiders shirt makes me want to help you less.”

Cherry’s students recruited friends from the U.S. to participate in the study, and the number of subjects grew to 160.

In one hopeful sign from the study, subjects who identified themselves as altruistic by nature were more likely to help anybody in need, even if that person were wearing a rival shirt.


“A die-hard fan who is also altruistic will look at the person in need before they see a logo,” Dalakas said. “But a die-hard fan who is not altruistic will see the logo before they see a person.”

The second study was presented at the Academy of Marketing Science conference in Denver in May.

About half of the subjects were University of Georgia fans and the others were from other schools, and Dalakas said the study would have more meaning if subjects were evenly divided between two rivals.

With that in mind, the next study will be conducted in the fall by Colleen Bee, professor of marketing at Oregon State University, who will study students from her school and from the University of Oregon. The school’s two football teams face one another each year in a game called the Civil War.


After the final study is complete, Dalakas said he hopes all three will be published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.