Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 9, 2025

Moderate Prenatal Alcohol Exposure and Quantification of Social Behavior in Adult Rats
Published on: December 14, 2014
Antisocial behavior in football matches: Do changes in alcohol sales policy increase violent acts?
Marke Geisy da Silva Dantas1, Luciano Menezes Bezerra Sampaio2, Thadeu Gasparetto3
1Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Norte, Canguaretama, RN, Brazil.
Background:
The violent behavior of football fans is constantly associated with their drinking habits. Aiming to reduce its impact, policy makers often ban the sales and consumption of alcohol beverages during matches. Nonetheless, there are few papers that empirically analyzed such relationship, and our paper aims to shed light on this question.
Methods:
Out dataset comprises 4,560 matches from the first and second tiers of the Brazilian League, where 245 exhibited at least one antisocial behavior from fans. Ordered logistic regressions are used as method.
Results:
Our empirical findings evidence that the sales of alcoholic drinks do increase the likelihood of severe antisocial behavior. We also observed a higher likelihood of violent cases when the home club loses its match as well as during crowded matches.
Conclusions:
We conclude that the change in the alcohol police in Brazil did show a significant association with the likelihood of antisocial behavior among football fans. However, since the magnitude of such effect is small, further research is needed to examine the potential benefits of this policy change.
Related Concept Videos
CNS Depressants: Alcohol and Nicotine
Self-Presentation: Self-Monitoring and Self-Handicapping
Social Facilitation
Deindividuation
Cognitive Dissonance
Behavior Modification
A real-world application of operant conditioning principles is applied...

