Image Repair Across the Racial Spectrum: Experimentally Exploring Athlete Transgression Responses

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which an athlete’s race impacts the image repair process within media-filtered athlete transgressions by utilizing a 5 (race) × 3 (response strategy) factorial experiment and employing Benoit’s (1995) image repair typology. Reponses from a national sample of 215 participants revealed that, independent of race, the mortification strategy was more effective for repairing an athlete’s image compared to reducing offensiveness and evading responsibility strategies, supporting current image repair studies. This study also revealed that the athlete in the White condition was uniformly viewed as being less successful than four other racial conditions (Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern) in achieving image repair, a new result within this stream of image repair scholarship. Conclusions related to social identity theory and expectancy violation are rendered.

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