Although it may sound hyperbolic, many of the defining moments of my life have been centered around Kentucky basketball. From the season when Kentucky won 38 games in a row, to those iconic buzzer-beaters Andrew Harrison hit to send the team to the National Championship game in 2014, Kentucky has shaped a good amount of my perception of the world. As a child, I used to attend over 10 games a year, with most of the family vacations I took being to Kentucky sporting events. This emotionally allowed me to become invested in the team to a greater extent than nearly anything else in my life. Rather than choosing to idolize NBA players or other influential figures, my idols as a young child were primarily Kentucky or ex-Kentucky players.

Growing up in North Carolina as a Kentucky fan led to a special hatred of two teams in particular, Duke and UNC. With the three programs being some of the most storied in college basketball, they played regularly in the regular season and the NCAA tournament. And with both schools being less than an hour’s drive from where I lived, many of my friends were ardent Duke or UNC fans, resulting in extensive trash talk any time Kentucky lost to either. A Kentucky loss against Duke or UNC almost guaranteed some kind of embarrassment from my friends. I had special disdain for Duke due to the particular obnoxiousness of my Blue Devil fan friends. My house even contained a book called Duke Sucks: A Completely Even-handed, Unbiased Investigation into the Most Evil Team on Planet Earth, which was constantly set up on display on my living room table. This disdain continued for over a decade. And then I started attending the university I despised for most of my childhood.

As a large portion of my identity consisted of overenthusiastically supporting Kentucky and condemning Duke, the transformation into a Duke supporter was a real transformation indeed. My fandom for Kentucky often served as a means to almost dehumanize anyone not supporting the team. After all, our brains have intrinsic tendencies to dehumanize those not in our particular group affiliation and classify those within the group affiliation as “better.” Many psychologists believe that at a primal, fundamental level, the intergroup relationship between “in-group” and “out-group” biases serves as the basis for all manner of conflict among human beings, from war to racial and ideological discrimination. In my life, I have seen it extensively through my absolutist approach to Kentucky basketball fandom, which entailed a love of the “in-group” of Wildcat fans and a hatred of the “out-group” of Blue Devil fans. This ideology was seared into my identity. To cross the barriers that defined my identity for over a decade, I needed to face the cognitive dissonance that came with doing so.

The idea of cognitive dissonance is crucial to the way that humans approach the intake of new information. Every person has their own schema which contains nearly all of the information that shapes the way that they perceive the world. This new information being taken in must either be consonant (if it follows the information already in the schema) or dissonant (if it opposes information already ingrained in the schema). Despite cognitive dissonance seeming like something easy to identify, and therefore, perhaps, to overcome,  it tends to be incredibly difficult to do so due to the brain’s tendency to ingrain information into one’s identity. The most common example is in politics, where individuals will often reject information that incites cognitive dissonance, even if it is fully accurate (what is called “confirmation bias”). According to social identity theory, basically any piece of information can contribute to one’s categorization of the world, often with direct impacts on personal identity. Consequently, new information that causes cognitive dissonance not only violates information one has, but also one’s own personal identity. This prompts extreme discomfort for individuals, causing one to try and avoid cognitive dissonance at all costs. 

After I was admitted to Duke, I experienced a shift in the intergroup relationship between me and others, both intrinsically and extrinsically. In most of my social life before college, my extrinsic identity was relegated to a Kentucky basketball superfan. Once I got into Duke, a primary identifying aspect of me for others was less of my extreme Kentucky fandom and more of the fact that I was attending Duke. The intergroup relationships began to shift, with the role of my fandom being minimized for prioritization of what school I was attending for college. Furthermore, my own intrinsic identity was forced to shift, as my hatred of Duke was violated by my enrollment at the university. To rectify this cognitive dissonance, I mentally underwent many strategies to minimize the mental distress that the conflicting information would have on my personal identity. In doing so I tended to shift my intergroup bias further towards UNC, as well as altering my psychological relationship in reference to basketball players.

Before enrolling at Duke, the role of basketball players within my life tended to follow a path based on my general dissociation from the players. As a child they were typically the primary celebrities that I looked up to, with the role often reserved for Kentucky basketball players. Through becoming older (and possibly wiser), I began to see the players simply as entertainers, typically regarding them as I would an actor or musician. In my general schema they were often dehumanized, with their individuality limited to what I saw on the court or social media. Rather than perceiving them as an individual with their own lived experiences, I tended to minimize their being to what they did on the court or field, and the often artificially glamorized posts they made on social media.  With sports being a primary focus of my life, the failure of social cognition when viewing the players was an essential aspect of the way that I viewed basketball and my relationship to it.

Even while acknowledging social cognition and the massive role it has in one’s life, it is still hard to break the mental fallacies it perpetuates. When entering Duke my freshman year, I anticipated possibly seeing the basketball players around campus, but never perceived the distinct possibility that I would have classes with them. This possibility turned into a reality when I enrolled in the FOCUS program, where I had a class with all of the incoming freshman players. Suddenly, the general dissociation I felt for most of my life towards basketball players was broken. Rather than being limited to only seeing their life controlled through media, I saw them constantly in their daily lives. This shattered the pre-existing prototype I had of college basketball and NBA players, as I saw them less as celebrities and more as friends and classmates. To avoid the extreme cognitive dissonance that is undergone when radically changing a prototype, I needed a way to effectively classify this change and rectify it within my schema. 

Despite my proximity to Duke basketball players, I was still far removed from Kentucky basketball players, the idols of my childhood. Being nearly 8 hours away and practically impossible to communicate with compared to the players I had a class with, Kentucky basketball was incredibly distant from my everyday life. Lentucky was nearly 300 miles away, whereas I could see the Duke players on campus regularly. This prompted a distinct change in my categorization of college basketball within my schema. Similar to a high school team one would root for, Duke basketball became a team I rooted for purely due to intrinsic pride related to the fact I attended the university, and wanting to support the players I considered friends. Comparatively, I continued to view the Kentucky players as more of celebrities than the Duke players due to my relative isolation from them. As my friends can attest, I continually overenthusiastically propped up players like Reed Sheppard, despite him being significantly less prominent than many of the Duke players at the time. This distinction served as vitally important in rectifying the cognitive dissonance I felt while watching college basketball, allowing for a necessary distinction between Duke and Kentucky within my schema. Creating these boundaries for my prototype was necessary to continue enjoying one of the things that was essential to my childhood, Kentucky basketball. 

While supporting your team is one of the essential facets of fandom, one could argue that hating a rival is just as essential. There are many rivalries essential to the way sports function, such as the Boston Celtics versus the Los Angeles Lakers, but my childhood was centered around Kentucky’s many rivalries. Louisville, Tennessee, Indiana… Kentucky has many rivalries, with two of the more prominent ones being Duke and UNC. While attending Duke, it is almost criminal to despise Duke basketball. Tickets to games are typically free, and the student section is almost always incredibly exhilarating. Despite this, I also couldn’t just remove my hatred of North Carolina basketball teams instantly, as it was seared into my mind from an incredibly young age. To rectify this difference, I shifted my hatred of both UNC and Duke into a unilateral loathing towards UNC, becoming more centered on disliking them.

Competing ideologies are common in many different aspects of life, but are virtually incompatible in the zero-sum world of sports. For basketball the binary outcome of contests results in a singular outcome, either one team wins or the other will. As a child, my extreme dislike of UNC was predicated on previous outcomes, in which Kentucky’s title hopes were sometimes destroyed by a loss to the school. This fostered disdain towards the University based on the prospect of a championship being mercilessly destroyed by the evil entity of UNC (or at least this is what 11-year-old me believed). The natural outgroup bias against UNC was continued and even maximized towards Duke, who commonly shot down any hopes Kentucky had of a championship. When enrolling in Duke I realized the need for an alteration in this ideology, as Duke was suddenly the school I was supporting. To do so, I altered my hatred of North Carolina basketball in general to one that is singularly focused on UNC. Gloating in every UNC loss compared to just those against Kentucky, I began to revel in every falter the basketball teams had, both from the perspective of a Kentucky fan and a Duke student. My extreme dislike of UNC basketball was further realized with many of my friends who attend the University, with every Duke win resulting in extensive boasting, more than anything I did previously. To rectify the differentiating ideals of a Duke fan and North Carolina Basketball detractor, disliking UNC became the primary prototype I underwent. Through doing so, I was able to continue my schematic ideal of despising the basketball team consistently opposed against Kentucky, while supporting the school that I attend. At the same time, this allowed me to continue my intrinsic identity as a Kentucky fan diametrically opposed to North Carolina basketball, all while attending Duke. 

To properly rectify facets of my identity that were broken when attending Duke, cognitive alterations were needed. Despite the relative absurdity in the priorities I set to maintain my previously ingrained ideals, they reveal larger trends common to human cognition. To integrate information into a relative schema with minimal cognitive dissonance, boundaries are often placed that seem ridiculous in theory. The differentiation I create between UNC and Duke is logically extreme, and there are few major distinctions that would cause me to look at Duke players as peers and Kentucky players as celebrities, yet even while recognizing this behavior I still engage in it constantly. Through creating these artificial boundaries within my cognition, I can naturally continue being a Kentucky fan while supporting Duke, despite the contradiction integral to the nature of college sports and my life.

by Will Abell

If you’re interested in looking more into the psychology of bias, group identity, and cognitive dissonance, check out these research articles:

1. Benoit, William. Cognitive Dissonance Theory: An Introduction. American Psychological Association, 2022, https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/Cognitive-Dissonance-Intro-Sample.pdf.
2. Greenwald, Anthony G., and Mahzarin R. Banaji. “In-group Bias.” The Decision Lab, https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/in-group-bias.
3. Haslam, S. Alexander, et al. “The Effects of Team Identity Formation and Sport Team Identification on Mental Health, Cognition, Behavior, and Physiology.” ResearchGate, 2013, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258509125_The_Effects_of_Team_Identity_Formation_and_Sport_Team_Identification_on_Mental_Health_Cognition_Behavior_and_Physiology.
4. Plous, Scott. “The Psychology of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination: An Overview.” National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2014, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3915417/#S8.