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Record W4413901537 · doi:10.1186/s12954-025-01304-x

The ‘selves’ in doping and its psychosocial mechanisms: harmonised multi-country evidence from high-performing athletes in the UK, US, and China

2025· article· en· W4413901537 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Shuge Zhang, Ian D. Boardley, Jingdong Liu, Jules Woolf

Bibliographic record

VenueHarm Reduction Journal · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDoping in Sports
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersWorld Anti-Doping Agency
KeywordsPsychologyPsychosocialNarcissismSocial psychologyModerationClinical psychologyPsychotherapist

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: Doping remains an ongoing threat to clean competition. To date, global preventive initiatives have not addressed critical psychosocial antecedents of doping thoroughly due to the scarcity of knowledge regarding its psychosocial mechanisms from a harmonised cross-country perspective. We, therefore, conducted a multi-country investigation testing the interplay of two important yet overlooked attributes, namely narcissism and self-compassion, and examined their psychosocial mechanisms underpinning doping. METHODS: Using a sample of 499 high-performing athletes (80% competing at national level or above) from the UK, US, and China, we performed a series of multi-variate multi-group moderation models to test the narcissism × compassion interaction on doping and examined potential psychosocial mechanisms underlying such effects. In all analyses, we applied cluster control to adjust for coach-/team-level confounds and compared fixed vs. random effects models for cross-country comparisons. RESULTS: We found an identical interaction across study countries showing self-compassion alleviates narcissism-related doping willingness (especially that vulnerable narcissism drives). Grandiose narcissism's protective effect on vulnerable narcissism-related doping moral disengagement was invariant across countries. Resilient coping appears to be a consistent mechanism across study countries that explains narcissism-related risk and compassion-related protection. Fear of failure manifested varied mechanistic effects in different study countries, inferring potential cross-cultural differences. CONCLUSION: Vulnerable narcissism is a critical person-level correlate of doping. Grandiose narcissism, in the presence of self-compassion, can alleviate such risk thanks to enhanced resilient coping. Future education and interventions should tackle these important person-level attributes for anti-doping.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.703
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.325
Teacher spread0.298 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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