The Greta Thunberg Effect: People Familiar with Thunberg are More Likely to Act

“We have started to clean up your mess. And we will not stop until we are done.” – Greta Thunberg

In 2018, teenager Greta Thunberg held her first school strike; she skipped school to camp outside the Swedish parliament, asking politicians to take immediate climate action. What began as an individual student's demand for change has now grown into global climate strikes in which activists and youth around the world gather outside their local parliaments to demand that the government address the climate crisis. But what psychological factors could help explain Thunberg’s contribution to global climate activism?  How broad is her impact? Is she simply preaching to the choir or is she reaching diverse audiences?

Based on a nationally representative survey of over 1,300 U.S. adults, we found that Americans who report greater familiarity with Greta Thunberg also feel more confident that by working together with others, they can mitigate climate change. They are also more willing to take collective actions such as signing petitions, pressuring elected officials, and making donations to address climate change. We call this the “Greta Thunberg Effect.”

By the Greta Thunberg Effect we of course do not mean to imply that a single exposure to Greta Thunberg causes people to turn into climate activists. Instead, we documented a potentially important pattern of relations that may explain why Thunberg has been able to mobilize collective action: people who report being familiar with her feel more empowered to make a difference, which in turn correlates with their willingness to act on climate change. 

Why the Greta Thunberg Effect?

Typically, well-established figures (such as Pope Francis or James Hansen) have mobilized climate action presumably in part due to their religious and academic authority. But Greta Thunberg lacks any authority or elite status. How then has she been able to empower more than 10 million people worldwide?

To feel empowered, people need to believe that change is possible. Thunberg proclaims that “there is still time to change everything around.” Moreover, her Fridays for Future campaign mobilizes students to take part in climate strikes every Friday for the sake of their shared future on this planet. The campaign exemplifies that anyone—even young students—can make a difference through civil action. Most importantly, Thunberg’s actions live up to her words—she challenges powerful leaders and institutions at various international platforms, such as the United Nations.

Therefore, Greta Thunberg embodies what psychologists refer to as “collective efficacy,” or demonstrating that by working with others, anyone—even someone without elite status or authority—can contribute to change.

We also wanted to understand how prevalent the Greta Thunberg Effect was among various audiences. Thunberg is often considered a youth icon, and her demands align with liberal policy preferences. Could young and left-leaning Americans relate more to her than older or more conservative Americans, and therefore be more strongly influenced by her?

Surprisingly, we found that the Greta Thunberg Effect is similar across age groups, although we did not survey children and teens, who we suspect might be most strongly influenced by Thunberg because she began her activism as a school student. We also found that the Greta Thunberg Effect was present across the political spectrum, although it was stronger among liberals than conservatives.

Correlation Does Not Equal Causation

How can we be sure that our findings reflect Greta Thunberg’s unique influence, and are not just the result of people’s general support for the environment? Although we cannot be entirely sure, we found that the effect of people’s familiarity with Greta Thunberg remained relevant even after taking into account their general support for climate activism and their political ideology. Political ideology is strongly related to people’s concern about climate change. Therefore, being familiar with Thunberg appears to have a unique influence on people’s willingness to take action, even after accounting for these other motivations.

But what if the direction of influence went the other way? Is it possible that people already motivated to take climate action are more likely to be familiar with Greta Thunberg? Although this is possible, our analysis did not support this “reverse-effect” well.  Of course, reality may be even more complex and dynamic; being engaged in climate activism might well lead to more exposure to Greta Thunberg, which in turn might lead to even more activism.

What Does This Tell Us About Climate Action?

The patterns in our data suggest that people may feel motivated to take action when they are exposed to inspirational leaders such as Greta Thunberg who provide hope and evidence that change is possible. How can activists further amplify their impact? Considering political differences on climate change, they must appeal to people across the political spectrum. The Greta Thunberg Effect tells us that calls to action need not remain within echo chambers—they can reverberate globally, empowering millions to work together to make a difference.


For Further Reading

Sabherwal, A., Ballew, M. T., van der Linden, S., Gustafson, A., Goldberg, M. H., Maibach,     E. W., Kotcher, J. E., Swim, J. K., Rosenthal, S. A., & Leiserowitz, A. (2021). The Greta Thunberg Effect: Familiarity with Greta Thunberg predicts intentions to engage in climate activism in the United States. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. doi: 10.1111/jasp.12737. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jasp.12737

Roser-Renouf, C., Maibach, E. W., Leiserowitz, A., & Zhao, X. (2014). The genesis of climate change activism: From key beliefs to political action. Climatic Change125(2), 163-178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1173-5

Swim, J. K., Geiger, N., & Lengieza, M. L. (2019). Climate change marches as motivators for bystander collective action. Frontiers in Communication4, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00004

 

Anandita Sabherwal is a doctoral student in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science and the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge. He is also a research affiliate with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Janet K. Swim is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Pennsylvania State University and chair of the Pennsylvania State University College of Liberal Arts Sustainability Council.

 

Expressing Thanks Can Deter Socially Disadvantaged People from Fighting Injustice

When someone helps us, gives us a gift, or wishes us well, saying “thanks” probably seems like an indisputably positive and appropriate response. In fact, research suggests that expressing gratitude has a variety of benefits.  Beyond promoting positive social interactions, expressing thanks can increase people’s well-being, strengthen relationships, and lead the thankful person to focus on their benefactor’s needs and come up with ways to return the favor. These findings have led self-help authors to strongly encourage people to cultivate gratitude on a daily basis.

However, when we turn to the role that gratitude has played in the relations between social groups, the picture is different. For example, women who protested for their right to vote and Black people who fought for racial equity in the Civil Rights era in the United States were often accused of ingratitude. Today in Europe, refugees who engage in protests are called ungrateful, and immigrants who have gained citizenship are sometimes still expected to show gratitude to the nation who receives them. These examples illustrate that disadvantaged groups have faced explicit demands to express gratitude, especially when they tried to challenge injustice. In fact, insisting that disadvantaged groups show gratitude might have served as a way to calm down protest, ensure that the groups cooperate, or make disadvantaged people acknowledge appreciation for the benefits they received—even when those “benefits” were basic human rights.

Julia Becker and I wondered whether expressing gratitude to socially-advantaged group members does, in fact, reduce disadvantaged groups’ protests against injustice. We thought that, when someone who belongs to a socially disadvantaged group—such as a lesbian woman or a black man—expresses thanks toward someone who belongs to a socially advantaged group (such as a heterosexual woman or a white man), saying “thanks” might prevent them from confronting potential discriminatory behavior from the advantaged group member. In other words, expressions of thanks might “pacify” members of socially disadvantaged groups.

We tested this idea in a series of studies conducted in Germany and the United States. The participants in these studies were members of low-power groups in various contexts. For example, some participants were employees who interacted with a manager, some were students interacting with a professor, and some were women interacting with men. In all studies, we constructed the experimental situation so that the low-power participant was treated in an unfair or offensive way by the higher power person, for example, by making a disparaging remark. Later, the high-power group member provided some kind of benefit to the participant, for example, by giving the participants the reward that he had received for participating in the study.

In some studies, participants could decide whether to express gratitude to the high-power group member, while in other studies, they were either required to express gratitude or were not allowed to express gratitude. Next, we measured how much the participants were willing to protest or object to the high-power person’s unjust behavior or the extent they actually protested (for example, by complaining about the person or confronting them directly).

Overall, low-power participants who had expressed gratitude to the high-power group member protested less than participants who had not expressed thanks. Merely expressing gratitude to an unfair high-power group member reduced participants’ willingness to stand up for themselves.

Additional analyses suggested that this “pacifying” effect occurred because expressing gratitude led the participants to forgive the higher-power person. And because forgiveness can create the impression that justice has been restored, the participants may have felt less need to protest.  

So, although expressing gratitude can lead to positive effects in situations where people have more-or-less equal power, our research suggests that expressing thanks can lead to harmful effects when people are not socially equal. The positive, other-oriented, and reciprocal nature of gratitude expressions can encourage disadvantaged group members to censor their objection or criticism of the injustice they experience.

How can this problem be avoided? One possible way for disadvantaged groups to avoid this pacifying effect may be to refrain from expressing gratitude in certain situations. Of course, this does not mean that disadvantaged group members should stop thanking people, because then they would be denied the benefits of expressing gratitude. However, our research suggests that, if you are a member of a socially disadvantaged group, you might want to be selective about who and when you thank.

In addition, by learning that it might sometimes be protective for disadvantaged group members to not express gratitude, advantaged group members could lower their expectations that they will be thanked (for example, when doing volunteer work). In that way, they can avoid frustration if they feel like they don’t receive as much gratitude as they think they deserve.

This research is only a first step in studying gratitude in situations that involve social inequality. The social norms that encourage members of disadvantaged groups to express gratitude in unfair situations certainly deserve more critical reflection, both by researchers and in our everyday lives as well.


For Further Reading

Ksenofontov, I., & Becker, J. C. (2019). The Harmful Side of Thanks: Thankful Responses to High-Power Group Help Undermine Low-Power Groups’ Protest. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219879125

 

Inna Ksenofontov is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Osnabrueck and the University of Hagen in Germany. She studies how seemingly prosocial relations between social groups can solidify social hierarchies and how disadvantaged group members’ attitudes and behaviors might be involved in the maintenance of social inequality.

 

Conspiracy Beliefs Could Increase Fringe Political Engagement, Shows New Study

Conspiracies abound in society and can have real world impacts when it leads some people to act, whether that means becoming more engaged politically, or less engaged.  Previous research linking conspiracy beliefs and political actions provide mixed results. Some studies show people with a conspiracy worldview are more likely to disengage politically, while others show they are more engaged. 

New research appearing in Social Psychological and Personality Science finds that when studying an average person, conspiracy beliefs lead to more willingness for engagement in “non-normative” roles, like illegally blocking a public entryway, while avoiding more typical political engagement, such as voting.

“Once regular people accept the basic premises of a conspiracy worldview, they come the conclusion that violent means of political engagement are a plausible consequence.” Says Roland Imhoff, a professor of social and legal psychology at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, and lead author of the study, conducted together with Lea Dieterle (University of Cologne) and Pia Lamberty (Johannes Gutenberg University).

“This finding, together with the observation that many radical and terrorist groups employ conspiracy rhetoric in their pamphlets, might suggest that seeing the world as governed by hidden and illegitimate forces is a driving force for radical violent action as it a) seems justified and b) non-violent means seem futile,” says Imhoff.

The researchers conducted two experiments, one in Germany (194 people) and another with Mturk workers based in the United States (402 people). 

In both experiments, people were assigned to imagine being in a particular type of society. Some were assigned a conspiracy-focused description that suggested a few powerful groups controlled the fate of millions, others read an intermediate scenario where people wondered if the media and politicians could be trusted, and another group read about a world view that governments and the media were trustworthy and transparent.

Each person was then asked a set of follow-up questions about what political actions they’d be willing to engage in, from “normative” actions like voting, participating in rallies, or contacting media or politicians, to “non-normative” actions such as destroying property, harming others, or other illegal behaviors.

In both experiments, they found people who were presented with a high conspiracy scenario were more likely to engage in the non-normative political actions than those presented with a low conspiracy scenario. Political e

ngagement for normative actions. Was higher for those reading about low conspiracy scenarios compared to the other two groups.”

Imhoff notes that these are hypothetical situations, and understanding how things might play out in the real world need further research.

For future research, Imhoff suggests “we still lack a grip on the likely relevant differentiation between those who like or endorse conspiracies on social media or when we ask them to what extent they agree and those who actively produce, invent and disseminate conspiracy theories. Whether the latter category is of a similar psychological makeup as the former or just utilized conspiracy rhetoric for political goals is still not understood.”


Study: Roland Imhoff, Lea Dieterle, Pia Lamberty. Resolving the puzzle of conspiracy worldview and political activism: Belief in secret plots decreases normative but increases non-normative political engagement. Social Psychological and Personality Science. Expected online March 2020.

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.

Coping with Prejudice: Insights From Mindset Research

Holding a sign she couldn’t read, Megan Phelps-Roper stood at her first picket line at age 5, and for the next twenty years joined her Westboro Baptist Church family in spreading hate against groups from Catholics to Muslims to LGBT people. To most people, what Phelps-Roper did sounds biased, and it can be tempting to think of her as irredeemable.

But according to Aneeta Rattan, there are multiple ways to think about prejudice: one that assumes that it’s permanent, and one that invites change. These ways of thinking, or mindsets, are beliefs that drive motivation, goals, attributions, and reactions, and have important implications for how people decide how to respond to prejudiced statements. In some contexts, it is possible to avoid people who have expressed bias. But in the workplace, people anticipate continuing relationships with the person who expresses bias. Rattan’s research explores how best to cope while negotiating these ongoing relationships with people who express bias.

In these situations, targets of prejudice are faced with a choice: speak up or remain silent. It’s this choice, and the implications for how targets of prejudice cope, that Rattan explores. In her research, women and minorities who spoke up about a coworker’s prejudiced statement (or “confronted” it) felt better about their co-worker, and in turn felt more belonging at work, if they had a growth mindset: a perspective that acknowledged the co-worker’s potential to change.

Rattan cautions that a target of prejudice never has a responsibility to confront. However, confronting can be valuable: it sends a signal to someone who might be oblivious about the prejudice underlying their words. As Rattan puts it, “it’s always the responsibility of the person who expresses bias to change, but people who express bias can vary in how much they know that it’s bias.” In other words, if a well-intentioned person doesn’t know that their statements are prejudiced, then confrontation with a growth mindset can facilitate change.

A single confrontation may not change someone committed to a prejudiced worldview. But as Megan Phelps-Roper, who left Westboro Baptist Church after years of conversations with the people she thought she hated, wonders on Twitter, “If I can learn, who can’t?”


Written By: Liz Redford, doctoral candidate at the University of Florida
 
Presentation: "Mindsets and Prejudice Confrontation: Boundaries and Benefits of a Growth Mindset," part of symposium, Mindsets about Malleability Shape Intergroup Relations: New Insights and Outcomes, held Saturday March 2, 2018.
 
Speaker: Aneeta Rattan, London Business School

Recapping the 2023 Presidential Plenary: How Norms Change – Part 1

In what may become a yearly tradition here at the SPSPotlight newsletter, we are recapping the Presidential Plenary from the just-completed 2023 Annual Convention in this piece.

This year's plenary session focused on a theme that is central to much of the work we do as social and personality psychologists—norms, and how they change. Social norms—what others do, and want or expect us to do, have an impact on our own beliefs, feelings, and behaviors, and influence the world we create for ourselves. As we consider the ways in which social and personality psychology research can help address the issues of our generation—be it poverty, injustice, or conflict, or even improving individual health behaviors—much of this is dependent on understanding normative behavior and employing the power of norms to change behaviors in ways that are sustainable. Four scholars presented their work on norm change—Catherine Thomas, Colin Wayne Leach, Guy Elcheroth, and Christina Bicchieri. In this piece, we're focusing on the first two talks on poverty alleviation and understanding the complex dynamics of protest behaviors.

Watch the 2023 SPSP Presidential Plenary

Culturally Wise Interventions Can Help Reduce Extreme Poverty in West Africa
Catherine Thomas, Stanford University

As we think about how behavioral science can be used to address global problems, accounting for social norms is an important part of the puzzle. Social norms differ from place to place depending on cultural context, and tailoring interventions to norms can be beneficial to program success and sustainability. In an interdisciplinary partnership with the government of Niger, the World Bank, economists, and psychologists, Dr. Thomas and colleagues examined how "culturally wise" messaging could alleviate hunger by promoting women's entrepreneurship. To set the context, Niger is among the lowest-income countries owing to historical inequities. The nation is also at the frontline of climate change, due to its location at the edge of the Sahara Desert. The goal of this research program was to develop an evidence-based program to alleviate poverty and hunger, with the goal to promote women's entrepreneurship among women experiencing extreme hunger, and provide an alternative to subsistence farming. However, entrepreneurship can be seen as an unacceptable activity for women in a context with more rigid gender roles and an interdependent cultural context.

A "culturally-wise" intervention is one that eases barriers to change by attending to questions and concerns about a new behavior or opportunity, and offers a construal that aligns with culturally normative values and beliefs. In this case, they needed to design an intervention that promoted women's entrepreneurship as actively advancing interdependent values of respect and social harmony. Communities were randomly assigned to a control condition, where they received economic training (e.g. savings program) or three treatment conditions, all of which had components in addition to the base economic training in the control. The first treatment condition included an unconditional cash transfer of $300, the second included a culturally wise psychosocial intervention, and the third condition had all three together—economic training, cash transfer, and psychosocial intervention. Follow-ups were done one and two years after the initial intervention. The culturally wise psychosocial condition was comprised of a community film event and life skills training, both tailored to specific existing cultural norms. The final message of the film conveyed that entrepreneurship not only enriched the women entrepreneurs, but also helped them be useful to their families and village. After the screening, participants had a group discussion on how women's entrepreneurship could contribute to community values and goals, such as generosity and respect. The life skills training addressed goal setting, effective communication, and problem-solving in ways that were tied to interdependent values.

Did these interventions work? In short, yes. They found that women's entrepreneurship increased in all three treatment conditions compared to the control. With respect to poverty alleviation, comparing against a benchmark of extreme poverty as earnings of $1.90/day, the cash transfer group had greater economic gains compared to control, but was still below the benchmark. However, the psychosocial treatment group brought them up to exactly $1.90/day, and the third treatment group with both cash transfer and psychosocial training crossed the benchmark with earnings of $1.95/day. In terms of benefit to cost ratio of the different packages, the psychosocial package improved both economic gains and food security, while keeping costs low and producing a benefit three times the cost of implementation (among the largest benefit-to-cost ratio in this literature). Discussions during the follow-ups suggested that the success of the psychosocial intervention was driven partly by the interdependent (vs independent) construal framing of women's entrepreneurship and socially relevant exercises participants completed during the life skills training.

This work provides large-scale evidence from real-world data that culturally wise interventions are not only viable, but also necessary to solve social issues. With a scientific literature comprised largely of Western, high-income samples, our science may be culturally wise only to these contexts, and we may be missing out on key motivations forces like peace and respect.

The Dynamics of Sentiment Toward Racial Justice Protest in the United States
Colin Wayne Leach, Columbia University

Protest can be seen as normative or as the right thing to do, but sometimes, in situations where protests become violent, even violent protest can become normative locally in small areas or within particular groups. Dr. Leach and colleagues have developed the dynamic dual pathway that takes a systems perspective to explain protest motivations and the different norms that are created within groups in a localized manner. They argue that people come to define injustice as it relates to group-level identities, and within that collective, they may define various protest behaviors as appropriate for them (including civil disobedience, property violence, etc.), and this can then become normative within the bounds of that group. Social support plays an important role here in reinforcing cognitions and emotions surrounding injustice and protest, especially in the case of low-status and disadvantaged groups.

In exploring the nuances of how norms around protest behaviors are formed, we must first understand how the literature has defined normative and non-normative protest. Most psychological literature defines normative protest as what is perceived as legitimate protest, i.e. an injunctive norm—the majoritarian norm that peaceful and non-violent protest is seen as the only legitimate protest. While such a majoritarian view can establish a norm, the dual pathway model employs a systems view, allowing for multiple groups to have varying ideas of legitimate protest, including a violent protest. These group norms may be loosely tied to or even opposite to the societal norm of non-violent protest. Such a view—a system-of-systems view—is more consistent with the ideological and political differences in ideas around protest in society.

Dr. Leach and colleagues developed and tested the dual pathway model using small-scale experiments, and big-data analysis of news and social media. The latter affords rich data to examine the complex dynamics of protest in a way that reflects real-world sentiment. In an ongoing project examining sentiment around racial injustice through social media, the research team followed Twitter activity for three weeks following the killing of Michael Brown, with tweets including any mention of 40 different terms related to the killing. Their final sample comprised of 12.5 million tweets from 1.7 million users. Dominant themes that emerged in unique tweets included police racism and communal justice. When examining content sentiment, they found that those tweeting about communal justice were the only ones who had positive semantic content compared to those tweeting about police racism, the funeral, or officer shooting. When examining tweet content using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), models revealed that anger rose dramatically towards the end of the three-week period, consistent with the dual pathway model (and others) where anger predicts protest. Consistent with the dual pathway's view of a sense of collective efficacy predicting protest, content with references to power, strength, and affiliation also increased at the end of the period. Examinations of this kind of large-scale data allow researchers to examine the heterogeneity of people's cognition and affect, along with both broader societal norms and localized, group-defined norms that influence them.

We thank Drs. Thomas and Leach for sharing their findings and insights with convention attendees. Stay tuned for our next SPSPotlight feature, publishing on April 20, which will include a recap of the presentations that Drs. Elcheroth and Bicchieri delivered during the Presidential Plenary!

 

Why Do Leftists Engage in Activism for Some Ethnic Groups But Not Others?

Leftists’ solidarity with Palestinians is on the rise in the United States. Over the last two decades, support for Palestinians has nearly doubled among liberal Democrats. Some have even been willing to go to extreme means. In 2003, the American Rachel Corrie was killed by a bulldozer while fighting for Palestinian rights. More recently, hundreds of western Leftists have joined the Kurds, a stateless group that has been struggling for autonomy for decades, in their fight against the Islamic State and now against NATO member Turkey. Many never returned. Just this March, Anna Campbell became the first British woman to die while fighting alongside Kurdish forces in Syria. Usually people show such extreme support only for groups they are part of. This made us wonder, what drives activists such as Campbell and Corrie to risk their lives for groups they don’t belong to?

Our research suggests that these activists may have been driven by a visceral feeling of “oneness” -- something that has been termed identity fusion in the psychological literature. Importantly, this feeling of oneness with other groups may have been fueled by their Leftist political ideology. We found that when groups are commonly perceived as being oppressed, Leftists tend to feel a deep sense of connection to them -- often even deeper than to their own group. This sense of oneness, in turn, motivates many of them to defend such groups, even if it means risking their own lives.

In our research, we conducted a series of studies in different countries in which we measured people’s political orientation and their willingness to participate in extreme or risky activism for the Palestinians and Kurds. One of our first studies focused on a conundrum. Although one may argue that the situations faced by the Kurds and Palestinians are similar in many respects, Leftists tend to show solidarity with the Palestinians while being relatively uninvolved in the Kurdish struggle. So is the case in Norway, a country that has been historically left-wing and also pro-Palestinian while being reluctant to support the Kurdish people. We wanted to test whether different levels of oneness or identity fusion to these groups could explain why Norwegians support Palestinians more than Kurds. As expected, Norwegians experienced a higher sense of oneness with the Palestinians and this explained why they were more willing to join extreme protest for this group. Crucially, it was Leftist who felt especially connected with the Palestinians but not the Kurds. This finding made us wonder, what made Leftists care more about one group of people than the other? Could it simply be that they did not know about Kurds living under oppressive occupation?

To test this, we conducted a study in the U.S. in which we experimentally framed the Kurdish struggle as being an “oppressive occupation”. The more politically Leftist people were, the greater oneness they felt with Kurds and a higher willingness to engage in risk to support their struggle. Yet, this was only the case when we presented the Kurds as being under oppressive occupation.

Finally, we surveyed foreigners who were on the verge of joining or had already joined the Kurdish forces. On average, these individuals who were mostly from Western countries experienced a stronger sense of connection with the Kurds than with their own groups back home. Importantly, amongst these aspiring foreign fighters, Leftists who believed that their political beliefs morally compelled them to support the Kurds in their struggle experienced a particularly strong sense of oneness with them. This sense of oneness was again related to higher support for the Kurds and even to a willingness to actually sacrifice one’s life for them.

Our research can help us understand why people like Anna Campbell and Rachel Corrie were willing to risk their lives for other groups. What might appear irrational to some, may actually be a deep-seated psychological feeling of being “fused” with groups whose suffering one politically condemns. For the Leftist, this feeling tends to be especially strong for groups who are perceived as being oppressed.


Jonas R. Kunst, PhD is a post-doctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at Yale University and University of Oslo. Sasha Y. Kimel, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at California State University San Marcos.

Why Do People Protest?

Art Markman is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His research, in part, examines the way our ability to make comparisons affects cognitive processing and decision-making.

The increased number of organized protests in our communities has led to much discussion and research around the question: What motivates people to protest? Art Markman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been taking a look at this trend through a psychological lens.

“I’ve been really interested over the years in motivation and trying to understand the factors that motivate people,” Markman says. “Those motivations affect both people’s performance in tasks, as well as the evaluation of that performance.”

His interest in motivation led him to write several articles on the topic, drawing on other people’s research and trying to bring more psychology into the discussion.

He found that people who have an issue with something that is important to them rarely start with violent protests first. “What they normally do is work through other channels to try to resolve the issue that they’re having,” says Markman.

When this doesn’t provide a satisfactory outcome, they will next try protesting in a public, but inoffensive way. “You’ll see people holding signs or writing articles or doing things that are outside of, say, the legal system, but still within the general bounds of what we consider to be civil discourse,” he says.

If this does not work, the next step is getting people’s attention by offending them. Markman says the psychological mechanism for offending others is to transgress their so-called “protected values.”

Kneeling for the national anthem, for example, would transgress the protected values of some people. It’s an action intended to get their attention, and it’s not a surprise that people take offense.

And the offense is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. When writing about the NFL protests, Markman also looked at the “free speech” protests taking place at the University of California in Berkeley. These protests offended many on the more liberal end of the spectrum.

As a result, when people discuss protesting, they focus on the fact that they were offended by the actions, as opposed to focusing on the actual issues.

“The trick is to transition from ‘OK, this protest caused offense’ to ‘what’s the issue that’s at stake here?’” he says. “This is a good time to start paying attention and having discussions about core issues related to protest, rather than getting sidetracked over the message.”

When discussions on these topics come up, says Markman, everyone—including those in the media and those on social media—has a responsibility to remember the debate is not about the offensiveness of the protest, but rather about the actual issues.

One thing that surprised Markman is the trade-offs people often make when thinking about their protected values.

For example, during the NFL protests, in addition to the kneeling football players, there were pictures circulating of musicians and celebrities wearing clothing featuring the American flag. These, however, were not seen as offensive.

“There are situations when things aren’t made explicit, where we do accept some trade-offs of those values,” Markman says.

“If there were a simple way of changing the system, we would have done it by now,” he concludes. “We are dealing with very difficult issues.”