MASS v1.0: public draft

Pioneering Fandom Health™

Version 1.0Published October 23, 2026Open for comment through January 15, 2027

MASS (Mobilizing Assists at Societal Scale) is the first standard for mobilizing fan teams for health impact. We’re publishing it as an open draft because a standard should be built in public.

Thesis

The world’s largest care network already exists. More than three billion people are connected through football, gaming, music, entertainment and other fandoms.^{An estimated 3.58 billion people play video games, 61.5 percent of the world’s population. Global Games Market Report 2025, Newzoo, September 2025.} It’s waiting to be mobilized.

Despite its scale, there has never been a scientific standard for mobilizing fandom’s capacity to create societal impact.^{The Premier League’s Fan Engagement Standard, adopted across its clubs in 2023, governs supporter consultation and club governance, not health. Fan Engagement Standard, Premier League, 2023.}^{The ILO’s manual sets the international statistical standard for counting volunteer work in aggregate; it does not verify or mobilize individual acts. Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work, International Labour Organization, 2011.} MASS changes that.

Just as the WELL Building Standard turned buildings into measurable environments for human health, MASS turns fandoms into measurable environments for health.^{WELL-certified space now exceeds 6 billion square feet across some 100,000 locations in 137 countries, reaching an estimated 30 million people. Global WELL adoption experiences unprecedented growth, International WELL Building Institute, July 2025.} We call this Fandom Health™: fandom treated as a health environment, with its own unit of action, its own measures and its own standard.

The Assist

An Assist is our measurable unit of behavior change. It is an act of social support, motivated through fandom.

An Assist connects a demand for support with widely available supply through fandom, producing improved health outcomes at societal scale. Every Assist is verified by the person who receives it.

An Assist captures a social signal from a fandom environment.

Every Assist creates two measurable outputs: real-world impact and new intelligence about the environment in which that impact occurred.

MASS provides the scientific framework for understanding how fandom mobilizes behavior, coordinates collective action and produces measurable societal outcomes. Its purpose is to mobilize humanity’s largest networks against humanity’s greatest challenges.

The world has standards for measuring impact. MASS is the first standard for mobilizing fan teams for health impact.

The scientific domains of MASS

The MASS Standard is built on six fundamental dynamics of a mobilized fandom environment. Future publications will introduce additional domains to the MASS Standard, expanding the scientific understanding of how fandom environments can be mobilized for health impact (Fandom Health™).

The six domains of MASS, ordered from the individual fan to societal scale.

1
Behavior Change
Converts fandom into repeated real-world action.^{In a randomized trial delivered through 13 Scottish Premier League clubs, 747 men lost an average of 4.94 kg at 12 months, with 89–95 percent retention. Hunt K. et al., “A gender-sensitised weight loss and healthy living programme for overweight and obese men delivered by Scottish Premier League football clubs (FFIT),” The Lancet 383 (2014): 1211–1221.}^{Across professional-sport-delivered health programs, meta-analysis finds a pooled weight reduction of 3.2 kg at 12 weeks. George E.S. et al., “Effectiveness of adult health promotion interventions delivered through professional sport,” Sports Medicine (2022).}
2
Belonging
Builds the shared identity and trust that make people willing to act.^{In field experiments, shared fan identity raised the rate of helping a stranger from 30 percent to 92 percent; making a broader identity salient raised helping of rivals to 70 percent. Levine M. et al., “Identity and emergency intervention,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31 (2005): 443–453.}^{Across 148 studies and 308,849 participants, stronger social relationships were associated with 50 percent higher odds of survival. Holt-Lunstad J. et al., “Social relationships and mortality risk,” PLOS Medicine 7 (2010): e1000316.}
3
Coordination
Organizes millions of individuals into one functioning team.^{Foldit players solved a retroviral protease structure that had stood unsolved for a decade, and are credited as co-authors on the resulting papers. Cooper S. et al., “Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game,” Nature 466 (2010): 756–760; Khatib F. et al., Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 18 (2011).}^{Zooniverse volunteers have contributed one billion classifications underpinning more than 550 published papers. Zooniverse program records.}
4
Velocity
Accelerates how fast action spreads through the network.^{In a controlled experiment, identical health behavior spread more than four times faster and 40 percent farther in clustered networks than in random ones. Centola D., “The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment,” Science 329 (2010): 1194–1197.}^{Healthy behavior propagates measurably through social ties: across 1.1 million people who ran 350 million kilometers over five years, an additional kilometer run by friends caused an individual to run an additional 0.3 kilometers. Aral S., Nicolaides C., “Exercise contagion in a global social network,” Nature Communications 8 (2017): 14753.}
5
Participation
Expands how many people act, how often, and for how long.^{Fans of more than 80 professional football clubs, including all 20 Premier League clubs, have logged 241,993 verified actions for their clubs — meals, journeys and household changes, each photographed and checked before it counts. Planet League, program records, 2019–2026.}^{Between 1 June and 1 September 2014, more than 17 million Ice Bucket Challenge videos were shared on Facebook and viewed more than 10 billion times by more than 440 million people. “The Ice Bucket Challenge on Facebook,” Facebook Data Science, 2014.}^{Games Done Quick has held community-run events twice a year since 2010, drawing more than a million individual contributions across sixteen years. Games Done Quick program records, 2010–2026.}
6
Impact
Extends years of life lived in good health.^{In a multisite randomized trial, telephone peer support roughly halved the risk of postnatal depression among high-risk women. Dennis C-L. et al., “Effect of peer support on prevention of postnatal depression among high risk women,” BMJ 338 (2009): a3064.}^{Across cohort studies, volunteering is associated with roughly 20 percent lower mortality; the benefit accrues to givers as well as receivers. Jenkinson C.E. et al., “Is volunteering a public health intervention?” BMC Public Health 13 (2013): 773.}

Upgrading the CDC’s social-ecological model with a behavior-change driver: fandom.

The social-ecological model describes health as the product of nested levels of influence around a person: individual, relationship, community and societal. It explains where behavior is shaped, but it names no layer that mobilizes behavior change. MASS adds that layer. In the MASS model, fandom becomes the mobilizing layer of the social environment: it turns a demand for support at the individual level (1) into a supply of Assists from family, friends and fellow fans (2), acts as the behavior-change driver (3) and produces beneficial outcomes at societal scale (4).

The social-ecological model, activated: MASS makes fandom the mobilizing layer of the social environment.

1Demand for support
2Supply of Assists
3Behavior-change driver
4Beneficial outcomes

Left: the social-ecological model (McLeroy et al., 1988), as adapted by the CDC. Right: the MASS model.

Six fields behind the standard.

Fandom Health is interdisciplinary. MASS draws on six fields, and each one anchors a domain the standard measures.

SoSocial PsychologyBelongingShared identity shifts behavior from individual interest to group norms, and people extend to fellow group members effort they would otherwise reserve for those they already know.

BsBehavioral ScienceBehavior ChangeParticipationBehavior change decomposes into specified, reportable techniques, and repetition in a stable context is what makes an action automatic rather than deliberate.

NsNetwork ScienceVelocityBehavior that requires social reinforcement spreads through clustered, redundant ties rather than long-range reach, and travels farther and faster in clustered networks than in random ones of the same size.

LgLongevity ScienceImpactMost of what determines health outcomes sits in the social environment rather than in clinical care, so a change in that environment registers as years of life lived in good health.

DaData ScienceCoordinationMatching need to capacity across a population is a computational problem — which request, which person, which moment — and the answer sharpens as the record of past matches grows.

HeHealth EconomicsImpactHealth gain becomes a claim on public resources only once it is expressed in a single quality-adjusted unit of time, the unit that makes distributed social support comparable with clinical care.

Comment on the draft

What happens next

We’ll publish a summary of what we heard, and what we changed, with the next version. Square Roots maintains MASS v1.0 and publishes how it is measured. An independent scientific council will oversee the standard and its measurement tools. Researchers can join it on the Partners page.

Versions

v1.0 · October 23, 2026 · Public draft for comment.