Speaking of Psychology - The Psychology of Protest and Activism with Lauren Duncan, PhD

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

For more than a week, protestors have filled the streets of cities and towns across the United States and even around the world, demanding an end to racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Lauren Duncan, PhD, a professor of psychology at Smith College and an expert on the psychology of protest and collective action, discusses why this is happening right now and what motivates people to come together to demand change. Join us online August 6-8 for APA 2020 Virtual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the past week, protesters have filled the streets of cities and towns across the United States and even in some locations abroad. People from across the political spectrum of all races, ages, and backgrounds are joining in, demanding an end to racism in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Major companies are posting messages of support for racial equality, and while some demonstrations have been marred by violence and looting, most of the protests and protesters are peaceful. Why is this happening right now? What has made this moment ripe for collective action on this scale?

What are the psychological forces that are driving people, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, to turn out in such numbers and in so many places? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that looks at the connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. I'm speaking today with Dr. Lauren Duncan, a professor of psychologist. at Smith College, who studies what motivates some people to try to change society, while others are happy with the status quo. While she didn't exactly write the book on the psychology of collective action, she did write the chapter of that name for the Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. Her research digs into the reasons why people act on their political

beliefs looking at internal factors like personality and external factors such as current events. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Duncan. Thank you very much, Kim. Let's start by talking about what's happening today that's driving people into the street in great numbers and not just in big cities, but in small towns and overseas. And let's be honest. We see injustices in the world every day, but rarely have we seen protests quite like what we're seeing now. So what's different about today? Well, I have been talking with friends and we've been talking about the concept of tipping point. anytime there's any sort of meaningful social change, there comes a tipping point where people who have been oppressed or treated unfairly or treated with violence in years and years and years have been protesting against it for years.

But it's only when the, quote, silent majority people who aren't actually directly affected by this maltreatment. It's only when those people finally take an interest and start to get outraged, that that causes the things to tip over into wide-scale social change. So you're asking about why are there so many protests right now? Well, I mean, obviously we have these events that so many instances of. innocent or black people getting treated violently by police. And that's been going on for a long time. You're saying what's different now. And there are a couple of things that are different right now. I would say the pandemic is actually one of the contributing factors. There are a lot of people who have been cooped up inside their houses for two months to three months. And some of them have lost

their jobs. They have a lot more time to be consuming social media, to be watching TV, to be up on political events. The fact that nowadays, everybody has a phone that has a camera on it means, and we also have many social media platforms, means that many people are direct witnesses to protests, to Not just the events that spur the protests, but the protests themselves. And for example, we've been seeing a lot on social media police reaction to peaceful protests. And that has also fueled these continuing protests. So the fact that people all have cameras, we're able to see these vivid visual images of unjust treatment. They get posted on social media.

social media is one of the best ways to reach millions of people. So it spreads like wildfire. So we have these distribution channels for amateur videos that is unprecedented. So we've got the pandemic where people have more flexible time and also the availability of avenues in which to post videos and to share information and to to analyze what's going on from a structural point of view, that's all been very important. I would also say in terms of the pandemic, I've heard a lot of talk about and read articles about how the pandemic is spurring a lot of people to think about what's really important in life. And so for people who have been kind of just caught up in the daily grind for years

and years and years or months and months and months, going to their jobs, taking care of their kids, going to school, whatever, and basically saying, I don't really have time to engage with what's going on outside of my neighborhood, because for a lot of these people, this is outside their neighborhood. Now they're sitting at home, they're with their families, and a lot of people are reevaluating what is important in life. And so people are. are saying, I see these things on social media. That is a really vivid image that is so unfair. And who am I as a person? I need to take a stand. And there are many ways to take stands and they're widely available. Social media makes lots of ways to donate money or to even do things like

just kind of click a like or repost things. There are many low-cost ways for people to protest. Then there's also, you know, in towns, cities across this country and in other countries, there are protests being organized daily. And so it's very easy to find a way to engage in this particular set of protests right now. Your work posits a model that shows two distinct roots to collective action. Can you talk about what they are and how. they're playing into the protests that we're seeing right now? Sure.

So in my model, we talk about the fact that there might be collective action that is taken. And the distinction is really, they're called movements of crisis and movements of conscience. In times of crisis, immediate reaction to maybe a killing or some sort of violence, people may react to what just happened in kind of a disorganized way without any articulated political analysis of what's going on. And so the classic example of that are riots that, you know, the Watts riots or the Los Angeles, what happened after Rodney King was acquitted in 1992, not Rodney King, the four white police officers who had beaten

King. Exactly. Yeah. So after, so when the, when the, when those four white police officers were acquitted of, of any wrongdoing in the beating of Rodney King, there were, there was a response from central Los Angeles communities of color. And that involved some violence or, you know, destruction of property, et cetera. but you wouldn't necessarily say there was a diffuse feeling of anger. There's a feeling of anger. Things aren't right, but there wasn't necessarily an articulated political analysis of this is exactly what needs to change.

It was just kind of this frustration people were acting out. But then you have crisis of conscience, which tends to happen in times where basic human needs are met and people are agitating for rights. So, you know, the women's movement is a classic example of this. Women have been agitating for equal rights for hundreds of years. And usually what happens for women's movements is, you know, you don't typically have kind of basically what you have is people who develop an analysis of the situation. They recognize sexism and they recognize things that are unfair. and then they take action that is very strategic and thought out about how we want to change things. What's interesting about this particular set of protests right now is it seems to be a combination of the two.

So there is a very sophisticated political analysis about institutional racism and about how police office, the kind of police state or, structural, the way police officers are socialized, how that has to change. So there's a sophisticated analysis about that. But there's also this sense of kind of diffuse anger, particularly in communities of color, that we can't lose another life. We can't lose another life. So it's kind of a combination of the two. But what's interesting is oftentimes when people go to a protest because they have this feeling of anger and they're not really sure what to do about it. When they go to a protest, they often then develop, they're exposed to the sophisticated political analysis that ends up sustaining long-term activism. So something like, say, the Women's March right after the election of Donald Trump, that seemed very diffused like there really wasn't a clear agenda.

Is that why that seems to have fizzled out? Well, I think, yeah, that definitely is an example of, that's another example of because that move, because women's rights have been a movement for so long, that was a combination of both again. So there were a lot of people who had never participated in protests before who attended the marches right after Trump was elected because right after he was inaugurated, because, They were just feeling so hopeless and that they needed to be around people who felt the same way they did. And a lot of young people who didn't have any sophisticated analysis of this. They just knew they didn't like this fact that Trump got elected. So they were there. But there were also, there were so many different groups that went to these marches.

I mean, they weren't just women's groups either. They were, you know, fighting for immigrant rights and anti-racist. groups and you know, you name it. If it's on the progressive left, they went to that movement. So, you know, I think trying to sustain something at that scale is going to be really hard. If, you know, if the original marches that happened right after the inauguration, if they were dependent on people who were, who needed an immediate outlet and not totally made up of people who had this sophisticated political analysis, of course the movements are going to get smaller.

But I wouldn't say that these movements have disappeared. They haven't. They've just kind of taken more standard paths now. They're being filtered through organizations that have been created since the inauguration of Trump. So, you know, even the hashtag Me Too movement, you could argue that that's part of it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I could see that. There's a new poll out that shows a large majority of Americans. Seventy-four percent

support the current protests and that more than two-thirds believe the killing of George Floyd wasn't an isolated incident. And this contrasts with 2014 when police killed unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, when Michael Brown was killed in New York City, the case of Eric Garner. And back then, there was a poll that found 51 percent of Americans. thought those killings were isolated incidents. This seems like a big change in just six years. Now, I realize that polls are just a snapshot in time, but has public opinion really changed that much? Is that a big change over a short period of time? I, this is why I'm arguing this is a tipping point. I think this is this is what happened.

This is what happened with gay marriage. This is, you know, for a long time, you know, people were arguing that that non-straight people deserve the rights to get married, et cetera. And that went nowhere for years and years and years. And then there, you know, maybe it's generational replacement. You know, there's part part of the time it's, you know, younger generations getting to be voting age, whatever, you know, just or just a series of events that. that happen, that again, convince the, quote, silent majority that finally, like, no, we need to

actually speak up for these people's rights. So I would say that the polls that you just, the change in the polls that you just talk about is really encouraging. I'm really happy to hear that. And that to me, that's evidence of that things are, things may actually have a chance to change. I mean, we've seen in the newspapers recently, too, about how police departments across the U.S. are reconsidering their, some are talking about completely, the Minneapolis police department is talking about completely starting over with how they're going to police or how they're going to think about police. And that's, that is really what needs to happen. And that I've just been reading, you know, town after town is doing this. And so I'm feeling like this is, this is, this isn't. tipping point and that things hopefully will change now. So your work talks about how identity is related to collective action. Can you talk about what that means? Yes. So hundreds and hundreds of studies in psychology have shown that there are three components, three things that if you have them tend to be related to participation in collective action. And the first is identity. And identity means

oftentimes when we've done research on this, we're usually talking about groups who haven't held a lot of power and influence in society. So, you know, African Americans, you might talk about versus whites, you might talk about, you know, women versus men, non-straight people versus straight people, the people who don't have a lot of power and influence in society. So those are called social identities, the kind of the group members. memberships. Everybody has a bunch of social identities that influence how they're treated in society and how they think of themselves. And everybody's got a unique combination of those sorts of social identities. And they tend to be, some tend to be privileged and some tend to be treated less well. And when we talk about collective action, we talk about identity. We're talking about organizing around subordinate group identities. So, So women, feminists identifying around their gender identity, African Americans organizing around their racial identity, et cetera. So most research on collective action has shown that when people identify with their social group and link their fate to the fate of other members of that group. So they don't just see themselves as individuals. They say something like the way.

African Americans are treated in society is going to impact how I'm treated. The way I'm treated impacts other members of my group, et cetera. So if they have a sense of common fate, if they think that what happens to them will have an impact on other members of their group and vice versa, that tends to be their social identity. And that's the identity component. But you can identify with a social group, like you can identify as getting. without having a politicized identity. So the next part that you really need is a sense of injustice. So the idea that I'm a member of a particular social group and my group has been unfairly treated in society.

We've been unfairly deprived of power and resources. We've been discriminated against. We've been treated with violence, et cetera. And it's not our fault. There's systemic reasons. And that's really the key. The key is to say to get away from these classic American meritocracy arguments, that the reason we haven't had a woman president yet is that just women aren't interested

or women aren't good enough. It's because there's systemic sexism in our society. Or the reason that African Americans in Minneapolis are seven times as likely to be treated with violence by the police than white people is not because the African Americans in Minneapolis are seven times more violent. It's because there's systemic racism there. So once you have a systemic analysis and you get away from, it's, you know, the individual's fault. It's because there's some structural stuff going on. Then that becomes, that helps you politicize that particular identity. So there's identity, injustice, and then the other one is efficacy, which is basically a belief that you need to work together as a group to change things and that you have to believe

that your actions will make a difference. So that's how the three are related. And then when we talk about allies, for example, white people who are out on the streets protesting right now, you can think about expanding identity so that it isn't just that you're focusing on members of your group. For white people protesting right now, it could be that they have embraced an anti-racist identity, which is a very good identity for white people to embrace when they're going to do this sort of work. But it could also be that they've expanded their definition. definition of identity to think about all of humanity. So oftentimes you'll see religious groups when they do this sort of activism, they're talking about morality and they're talking about

we are all human and they're not focused so much on their individual racial identity. They're talking more about all humanity. So there's two ways that works. Or even their individual religious identity, it's not like an Episcopal is marching for Episcopals. Right. Yeah. They're marching based on, you know, maybe some, maybe an identity that was helped, that was being formed or was helped in its formation by their religious beliefs or their beliefs. But the key identity there would be that I believe that there's no difference between

human beings of any racial group. And what happens, it's this sense of common fate. what happens to African Americans has an impact on me as a moral person as well. So as long as you have an identity that can embrace something like that, then that can also be motivating for activism. Looking through a historic lens as well as a psychological lens, are there factors that tend to make certain protest movements more or less successful? Yes.

This is the kind of the tipping point argument. and the silent majority argument. So Martin Luther King was a, Martin Luther King Jr. was a pretty brilliant organizer. One of the things he did to help the Civil Rights Act get passed, et cetera, was he was very strategic when he was working with local communities. So the Civil Rights Movement had been going on for years and years and years and people had been, African Americans had been protesting unfair treatment and discrimination

and segregation for years. But the tipping point came when he and his other leaders of the movement decided to hold protests in towns where they knew that there was a reactionary mayor or some sort of government leader where they knew that the police would turn fire hoses on them, where they knew that they would be treated with violence. And so they would choose those sorts of places to do peaceful marches, and it had to be peaceful, and the protesters had to be well-dressed because they were trying to convince the silent white majority in the north that they deserve to be treated like white people. And then they called the media in.

And so when people who were just kind of, you know, somebody sitting up in their farmhouse in Maine, opened the newspaper and saw on TV these images of these very respectable looking African Americans doing something very peaceful, but getting treated with this obvious, obvious disrespect and obvious violence, then that was a way. getting these kind of dramatic, there's no way you could think that this was okay, kind of image. Once you did that, then it was easier to, that's when the tipping point comes, is when this, I mean, that's one of the factors that can help create this tipping point is when you have these clear contrasts. And it's easy what's right and what's wrong. So setting dogs on people or turning the fire hoses on them was shocking. Yes, exactly. So somebody sitting in their farmhouse in Maine has never seen that before.

And, you know, you can read about it in the paper all you want. But when you see the image, the images are just, I mean, human beings are wired to respond to visual images. And so when you see it or you hear it or both, it's just much more likely to help create that thing that gets people who have privilege who don't, quote, have to do anything. things spurs them into action. And yet there were frightful images during the Vietnam War protests, but I know I was alive at the time, and certainly I was aware of what was happening, that you would hear people saying, well, those dirty hippies, they deserve it. Right.

I mean, how is that, how does that contrast with what African American people did in the 60s? Well, so it's very interesting. human beings are seem to have this natural tendency to group people into us versus them. And so one of the ways that you can get, if you're part of a subordinate group and you want to get the quote silent majority on your side is you want to get the silent majority to see your group as one of them. So this example that I was giving you with the peaceful civil rights movement protests, where they said you need to dress in your Sunday best, you need to be polite, you need to, I mean, it's ridiculous.

You shouldn't have to do any of that. Right. But this was a tactic used so that white people in the north in particular would look at these people and see these say, these people are exactly like me. Maybe their skin's a little bit darker, but they're exactly like me. So when you're talking about dirty hippies, quote, dirty hippies, most of whom were white, they didn't have that whole. So especially, you know, college students, white college students, part of the baby boom who were protesting Vietnam. They were from mostly from middle class backgrounds, white backgrounds.

They didn't have a whole legacy of knowing that when you go out and you protest that you're trying to convince the, quote, silent majority. And so you need to appeal to them and their conservatism, right? These were kids who were like, hey, I'm going to do what I want and this is wrong and they're going to listen to me. And so I think that's the difference. And so does that make sense? Yeah, totally. I mean, because I remember similar things with LGBT rights movement where there would be like the Christopher Street March in New York. And one faction would say, oh, my God, all of these people are naked and this is horrible.

And another faction would say, but this is our identity and we're not going to change. Right. And I'm not arguing that there's a right way or a wrong way to do any of these things. I think a lot of – most movements have multiple strands and different constituent. and different people who participate, and they probably need all of them. And, you know, for some people, you know, who are identifying with the gay rights movement

and who want to fight for the rights of gay people, it's really important to show the, you know, the totally flamboyant gay man out there or naked people or whatever. That was really important to get some percentage of the public on board. But there's also, you, also, if you're talking about trying to convince the quote silent majority, you're trying to,

first of all, you're trying to define that in a way where you don't really have very much information. But you're trying to appeal to all sorts of people. And so I think most movements need different types of people, a range of different types of tactics and people to be successful. And they tend to be more successful if they've got a range. So how important is one individual to a social movement? I mean, does a movement need a Gandhi or Rosa Parks or Lequellenza to succeed more quickly? Well, and the interesting thing about Rosa Parks, of course, is that she had been doing protest movements for years and years. And she was strategically chosen to be a symbol to. And so that, I think that is the point, right, is that individuals are sometimes, become symbols or figureheads just kind of because they happen to be in the right place at the right time. But sometimes they're strategically chosen by movements to to spur a particular reaction

or, you know, I mean, she was chosen to protest the segregation on the bus because who, again, the silent majority, if they see this kind of harmless looking little old lady on a bus and and she's so tired after her long day work, like who could ever say that, yeah, she needs to go sit in the back, you know? So sometimes it's strategic. I mean, you know, people, when you talk about leaders, some people are charismatic.

They tend to say things in the right way that happens to correspond with what needs to be heard at a particular time. So definitely their individuals are important. sometimes for strategic reasons, but sometimes because they just happen to be the right person saying the right thing at the right time. Let's change tracks here a little bit and talk about the role of family involvement in political activism. Yes. Are children of anti-war demonstrators, for example, are they any more likely to become activists today? And what might be the impact

on kids who are being taken to protest right now? Oh, absolutely. So yeah, the research and psychology has shown generational impact. So my own research showed that when we're talking about the protests against the Gulf War in 1991, I was at University of Michigan at that point and right around the time when President Bush, the first President Bush, was deciding whether or not to invade Iraq or not, I mean, Kuwait. So anyway, what we found was that, that kids, so college students who had parents who had protested the Vietnam War were much more likely to protest the Gulf War. Kids who had parents who had either fought in Vietnam or were pro-Vietnam supporters were more likely to be on the support our troop side. And interestingly, kids who had parents who didn't have any sort of reaction to the Vietnam War, active reaction, were also more likely to,

to not do anything in response to the Gulf War. So, and this is just one example of a study. There have been many studies that show that parents model behavior for children. They model how do you solve political problems? How do you react to political problems? So when parents are taking children right now to these protests, it will probably become just a part of how children see when they become adults. This is one of the things you can do.

This is a tool you have in your protests. toolbox if you see something unjust. And it's not just the behavior, right? They're also learning particular attitudes, too, at the time. So, yeah. So I would say there's two points I want to make here. One is that whatever your parents are modeling for you as a child becomes your default for kind of the way you're just going to see. This is how I deal with things in general. But when we're talking about young adults, young adults are in identity development. They're trying to figure out who they are, where they fit into the world, what they believe in. They may be questioning what their parents have taught them.

Is it consistent with what they believe now? They're trying to figure out commitments in that way. So lots and lots of research has also shown that whatever's happening when you're a young adult is going to have a long-lasting impact on how you see yourself even many, many years. later. And the classic example we have of that are these protesters against Vietnam or Vietnam War supporters, baby boomers in general, that may end up defining themselves even many years later as 70-year-olds as kind of 60 radicals, 60s radicals. So yeah, so these events that are going on right now can have a huge impact. Any thoughts on what we should expect to see in the coming weeks and months? Does this protest have legs? Can you tell yet?

Well, you know, just the fact that I'm reading in the paper about police departments making changes in my own town, my small town of Northampton here, they've had, we've had online city hall meetings with the public commentary and the last one. So I think it's usually supposed to be just a couple of hours. The first one was six hours. Wow. And then it was like midnight. They had to add another meeting a couple days later. And that was eight hours. So and the vast, you know, there are hundreds of people, my town of 30,000, hundreds of people who were getting onto the Zoom meeting and basically talking about, you know, cutting funding to the police department, et cetera.

So I, you know, you're seeing that in communities all across the United States. So I think that has legs. I think that the fact that people have organized over social media can have legs. I mean, I definitely think there, and this is true of any movement, and it's easier these days because of the way things are advertised on social media or presented on social media. It's very easy for people to kind of drop in for a day or two and then drop out. That's super easy. And they call it that, you know, that can be clickivism. That's one of the terms that we use is you just click a like and that's it.

But, you know, so some percentage of people will just end up dropping out of it altogether. But this will have an impact and, you know, some percentage of people will continue with this. So I personally see this as a tipping point. I think there is going to be more. sustained commitment to this, especially with younger people. And the other thing is, as long as it's really important for people who start participating in activism to get connected to a community and to make friends and to feel support because it's really hard to be angry all the time.

And so they need to find ways to connect in with an organization or a group. that has learned how to manage the emotional toll that it takes on people to do this sort of thing. This is not easy work for anyone. All right. Well, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Duncan, and for sharing your insights into these challenging times we're experiencing. My pleasure. The American Psychological Association has information and resources on our website regarding racism and disparities, along with techniques for coping and minimizing the stress and anxiety

you might be experiencing right now. So visit us at APA.org. You can also find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.w.combeckycology.org. And you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please give us a rating. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts,

email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman, Our editor and sound engineer is Chris Kondayan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.