Together We Rise: How Social Movements Succeed

Social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, surge when support grows for their social justice goals. At their core, social movements advance when people act collectively by rising in solidarity with a shared purpose to address injustice and inequality. Drawing on insights from consumer psychology, this review investigates how social movements succeed in creating social change. We build on an established 21^st‐century framework for how social movements succeed to outline the promising practices of successful social movements. For each of these practices, we identify the consumer psychology mechanisms that motivate collective action and encourage people to transform from bystanders to upstanders, those who provide the grassroots momentum for successful social movements. We illustrate this framework with examples from the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, we highlight insights from consumer psychology that promote an understanding of social movements, and we raise research questions to encourage more consumer psychologists to investigate how social movements succeed.     

Core social motives explain responses to collective action issues

Managing collective action issues such as pandemics and climate change requires major social and behavioral change. Dominant approaches to addressing these issues center around information provision and financial incentives to shift behavior, yet, these approaches are rarely effective without integrating insights from psychological research on motivation. By accurately characterizing human motives, social scientists can identify when and why individuals engage, and facilitate behavior change and public engagement. Here, we use the core social motives model to sort social psychological theories into five fundamental social motives: to Belong, Understand, Control, self-Enhance, and Trust. We explain how each motive can improve or worsen collective action issues, and how this framework can be further developed towards a comprehensive social psychological perspective to collective action issues.     

Value-based praxis in community psychology: moving toward social justice and social action

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a rationale for value-based praxis in community psychology. Although values need to promote personal, collective, and relational wellness at the same time, it is argued that community psychologists pay more attention to personal and relational wellness than to collective wellness. In order to address this imbalance it is important to promote the value of social justice. While praxis requires that we engage in a cycle of reflection, research, and social action, community psychologists devote more resources to the first two phases of praxis than to the last one. This paper offers a framework for deciding what values and what praxis considerations we should attend to and how we may advance social justice and social action in community psychology.     

消费决策过程如何彰显社会地位?基于最优化决策策略的视角

彰显社会地位是消费者行为的一项基本动机。以往的消费心理学研究大量聚焦产品特征如何彰显社会地位(即令观察者产生高社会地位的推断), 却很少探讨消费决策过程这一购买决策中不可忽视的重要因素对社会地位推断有何影响。本研究试图构建一个基于最优化决策过程信息的社会地位推断模型, 系统探讨: (1)最优化决策过程能否及如何彰显消费者的社会地位; (2)彰显社会地位动机是否为消费者进行最优化决策的原因之一; (3)最优化决策过程如何通过社会地位推断影响观察者后续的消费行为。本研究将为社会地位推断研究提供新的视角, 扩展最优化决策研究的外延, 并从全新的角度揭示最优化决策的内涵。     

Individual Orientation Toward Engagement in Social Action

The issue of how an activist identity develops is one of the core issues in social psychology and social movement research. Because of problems in the measurement of individuals' propensities to engage in social action, however, findings in this area are often equivocal, and cross–study comparisons and conclusions are difficult to draw. Hence, the aim of these studies was to develop a measure to assess individuals' propensities to engage in social action. This measure, the Activism Orientation Scale (AOS), demonstrates strong psychometric properties and allows assessment of activist propensity across a wide continuum of social action behaviors, ideological positions, and movement issues. Additionally, the broad applicability of the AOS allows for its use by researchers, activists, and policymakers.     

Integrating who “we” are with what “we” (will not) stand for: A further extension of the Social Identity Model of Collective Action

Collective action refers to any action that individuals undertake as group members to pursue group goals such as social change. In this chapter, we further extend the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) by including not just (politicised) identity but also moral motivations into its core, effectively integrating who “we” are with what “we” (will not) stand for. Conceptually, we utilise self-categorisation theory’s notion of normative fit to elaborate this special relationship between the moral and identity motivations for collective action. Empirically, we review two research projects (the experimental and survey-based Value-Identity Fit Project and the longitudinal Politicisation Project) that both suggest that the SIMCA needs to be extended to include, both conceptually and empirically, a broader range of (violated) moral beliefs and a focus on identity content. We discuss key implications of expanding the core of the SIMCA for the social psychology of collective action and social change, and suggest new directions for future theorising and research in this field.     

工具理性、社会认同与群体愤怒—— 集体行动的社会心理学研究

集体行动现象一直备受社会科学共同体关注。20世纪早期, 社会心理学曾是集体行动研究界的主导视角, 后逐渐转至社会学与政治学视角。最近20多年, 社会心理学视角开始复苏, 进入研究复兴期。社会心理学家先后确认工具理性、社会认同和群体愤怒这三种影响个体参与集体行动的主要前因变量, 并分别建构了包含工具理性和群体愤怒路径、包含工具理性和社会认同路径, 以及包含社会认同、工具理性和群体愤怒路径的三种重要集体行动参与模型。未来的集体行动社会心理学研究应重视行动情境类型、个体心理特征和除愤怒之外的群体情绪在集体行动参与中的作用, 考察理想信念等潜在新前因变量的可能地位, 加强与群际关系、歧视动机等其它经典研究领域的联系。     

Collective Action and Social Change: Examining the Role of Representation in the Communication between Protesters and Third‐party Members

Within social psychology, it has been proposed that to understand how collective action creates social change, it is relevant to examine the role that other members of society can have on it. However, few studies have empirically examined that. We argue that for that task, it is useful, first, and as some authors have already argued, to go beyond the sole analysis of the two‐sided inter‐group relations creating collective action; and second, to articulate this with contributions from social representations theory, which recognises that to understand social change, we need to examine communicative practices, or how communication is used between collective action's actors and other actors to re‐present identities. We analyse the protests by a movement of residents from a Lisbon neighbourhood that protested against the transformation of a neighbourhood's convent. Besides discussing this transformation with local authorities and failing to achieve its aims through that, the protesters also discussed it with other citizens. The analysis of this debate shows that the arguments and actions they used change throughout time, from local to global, as the latter were the ones more endorsed by other citizens and thus those that could help the protesters to achieve their goals. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Identifying Barriers and Catalysts to Fostering Pro-Environmental Behavior: Opportunities and Challenges for Community Psychology

In this paper, we report on an exploratory study of perceived barriers and catalysts to increasing pro-environmental behavior among people associated with the environmental movement. Perceived barriers include time, money, low efficacy and hopelessness. Catalysts focus on changing social norms, especially through education and institutional support. We discuss the tragedy of the commons and free-riding as impediments to change. We use this study as an entryway to hypothesize opportunities and challenges that community psychologists face in motivating and supporting actions to reduce the impact of global climate change. We provide examples of how community psychologists can foster these changes. In short, we argue that community psychology is well positioned to take a leading role in the fight for a carbon neutral future.     

Greenpeace campaign case study — StopEsso

As some corporations begin to enjoy power and influence on a scale comparable with or even more extensive than governments, it is consumers rather than voters who are starting to hold the key to political and social change. Companies which fail to take consumer opinion into account face real threats to their brand image, and ultimately to their bottom line. This case study explores the Greenpeace‐led StopEsso campaign, detailing the campaign history, strategy and tactics, and assessing its impact so far. It shows how negative consumer perceptions of ExxonMobil (Esso), based around the issue of the company's approach to climate change, are damaging the company's interests and that the changing interactions of other key stakeholders with the company could also threaten Exxon's competitiveness. It concludes that as corporate power increases, so must corporate responsibility, for consumers are increasingly unwilling to accept dishonest or unfair behaviour, and increasingly willing to withdraw their financial support for companies which fail to respond to their expectations. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications Ltd.     

How Financial Constraints Influence Consumer Behavior: An Integrative Framework

Financial constraints are economic limitations on behavior. Given that millions of people experience chronic or episodic financial constraints, we sought to review research that provides insight into how they affect consumer behavior. We propose an integrative framework that draws insights from multiple literatures that have examined financial constraints from different perspectives. The framework distinguishes between four perspectives, which are rooted in literatures on resource scarcity, choice restriction, social comparison, and environmental uncertainty and highlights different temporal stages of responding to financial constraints, distinguishing between reacting, coping, and adapting. Beyond the obvious negative effects of financial constraints, our framework emphasizes consumer resilience, highlighting that consumers often successfully cope with and devise adaptive strategies to deal with financial constraints. By broadening the behavioral and temporal scope of financial constraints considered within consumer psychology, this framework helps us to understand the often strong and sometimes counterintuitive effects of financial constraints on consumer behavior.     

Consumer Wisdom: A Theoretical Framework of Five Integrated Facets

We establish a parsimonious theoretical framework of consumer wisdom based on five mutually reinforcing psychological facets. Our research draws from wisdom literature and a set of 31 phenomenological interviews with informants who were identified through a multi‐stage nomination process. The five facets of consumer wisdom that emerged are Intentionality, Contemplation, Emotional Mastery, Openness, and Transcendence. Together, they comprise a data‐grounded, aspirational model of consumer wisdom—for researchers as well as consumers—to understand, maintain, and improve personal and collective well‐being. We discuss the implications of the framework and directions for future research.     

Meaning,grounding, and the construction of social reality

Culture has become a critical concept for social psychology over the past quarter of a century. Yet, cultural dynamics, the process and mechanism of formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture, has begun to be investigated only recently. This article reports the current state of play of a research program that takes cultural dynamics as its central question. In this approach, humans are construed as meaning making animals that create, recreate, and exchange information, and turn it into a meaningful basis for action. The locus of meaning making and remaking is an everyday joint activity. The grounding model of cultural transmission describes how cultural information is deliberately or inadvertently transmitted in a joint activity. As we go about our business of living our daily lives, we ground information to our common ground, and construct a social reality that is mutually meaningful and yet only local. If locally grounded information is further generalized to a large collective and disseminated through social networks, repeated and iterative activations of the grounding process maintain the social reality of the collective that we take for granted. Implications of the grounding model of cultural transmission and future research directions are discussed.     

Empowerment and threat in response to mass protest shape public support for a social movement and social change: A panel study in the context of the Bersih movement in Malaysia

One path to social change is through sustained collective action. Although such actions often explicitly target the public audience to raise support for a movement's cause, we know little about how the public psychologically responds to protests. To examine this question, a sample of Malaysians was surveyed before and immediately after the occurrence of mass street protests in Malaysia (N = 422) using a two-wave longitudinal design. Analyses revealed that (beyond pre-existing levels of movement identity and support for social change) experiencing empowerment in response to the protests promoted a supportive movement identity and more support for social change after the protests, whereas experiencing threat in response to the protests promoted an oppositional movement identity and less support for social change after the protests. This research suggests that the psychological impact of ongoing protests on the public can determine subsequent public support for the movement and its goals.     

Being well at work: the impact of organizational climate and social identity on employee stress and self-esteem over time

In organizational psychology, staff perceptions of organizational climate have been found to be an important predictor of employee outcomes, such as employee stress. However, only a small pool of research has investigated the psychological mechanism that underpins the relationship, and no past literature has explored how the relationship persists over time. This paper uses the social identity approach to investigate whether social identification predicts and mediates the relationship between staff perceptions of organizational climate and their levels of stress and self-esteem over time. Employing a sample of public school teachers, the study was conducted over two years (N = 281, 65 schools). The results indicated that social identification fully mediated the relationship between organizational climate and self-esteem longitudinally but showed no significant relationship with stress. The implications of these findings are discussed, with recommendations for future research.     

Right-Wing Ideology as a Predictor of Collective Action: A Test Across Four Political Issue Domains

Despite a vast literature documenting motivations for collective action, the role of sociopolitical ideologies, including right-wing ideologies, in predicting collective action is underresearched. Literature on right-wing ideological beliefs suggests that those higher in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) or social dominance orientation (SDO) hold specific attitudes or endorse specific policies, in part, because of factors such as perceived fear-based threat or empathy. In the present research, structural equation modeling (SEM) was run on pooled data from a diverse Canadian university sample and two American adult samples (total N = 1,469). Participants completed measures of RWA, SDO, fear-based threat, empathy, and domain-specific collective action. Results showed that RWA and SDO both related positively to collective action targeting societal moral breakdown but negatively to collective action aimed at equalizing race relations or fighting climate change. Whereas the indirect effects of right-wing ideologies via fear-based threat or empathy were significant in all four domains for SDO, the indirect effect of RWA was only significant in the climate change domain. Implications are discussed.     

不同类型集群行为的差异比较

集群行为是个体以群体成员身份参与的以改善群体地位为目标的行动。近年来, 西方心理学在集群行为领域的研究开始呈现差异化分析比较的研究趋势。根据行为模式是否符合社会规范, 可将集群行为分为常规集群行为与违规集群行为。根据参与群体的社会地位, 可将集群行为分为弱势群体集群行为与优势群体集群行为。根据集群行为的成就, 可将结果分为“成功”与“失败”两类。不同类型集群行为所涉及的心理机制、前因变量及发展趋势具有很大差异。今后的研究应探明不同类型集群行为间的内在联系, 重视文化背景因素并加强与其他学科研究成果的结合。     

Identity Politics and Politicized Identities: Identity Processes and the Dynamics of Protest

Over the last decades, the concept of identity has become increasingly central in the social psychology of protest. Collective identity, politicized collective identity, dual identity, and multiple identities are concepts that help to understand and describe the social psychological dynamics of protest. In this article, I theorize about identity processes in the context of protest participation: how group identification establishes the link between social identity and collective identity, how multiple identities and dual identities influence protest participation, and how collective identity politicizes and radicalizes. I will illustrate my argument with results from research into collective action participation among farmers in the Netherlands and Spain, Turkish, and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands and New York, South African citizens, and participants in street demonstrations conducted by my research group at VU‐University.     

Why did I eat that? Perspectives on food decision making and dietary restraint

Consumers trying to watch or restrict what they eat face a battle each day as they attempt to navigate the food-rich environments in which they live. Due to the complexity of food decision making, consumers are susceptible to a wide range of social, cognitive, affective, and environmental forces determined to interrupt their intentions to restrict their dietary intake. In this article, we integrate literature from diverse theoretical perspectives into a conceptual framework designed to offer a better understanding of the antecedents, interruptions, and consequences of dietary restraint. We outline a path for researchers to investigate how restraint behaviors in the eating domain influence a wide variety of consumer psychological phenomena. It is our hope that a collective examination of this literature provides a lens that directs future research on food decision making and dietary restraint and empowers consumers to invest their cognitive and behavioral resources towards healthy eating behaviors.     

ASPIRing to Mitigate Climate Change: Superordinate Identity in Global Climate Negotiations

The issues surrounding rising levels of atmospheric CO₂ and climate change have become part of the collective conscious and the vernacular of world leaders, media, and the public alike. Despite the widespread concern and attention, attempts to achieve a global commitment to mitigate climate change are failing. In this article, we suggest that the Actualizing Social and Personal Identity Resources model (ASPIRe; Haslam, Eggins, & Reynolds, 2003 ), developed to help organizations become more sustainable and productive, can promote more efficient negotiations in matters of global environmental concern. Using this model as a framework, the dynamics of the United Nations (UN) meeting in Copenhagen are scrutinized along with suggestions for how to structure future negotiations. Building on an understanding of existing UN‐type committee structures, it is argued that as the interests of individual nations and those of like‐minded other nations (subgroup interests) become the real basis for decision making on the issue of climate change the more likely it is that a higher‐order superordinate identity will emerge, which promotes aligned action. To date, the psychological aspects of social and behavioral change have been neglected, which could be a factor in explaining the lack of coordinated action on climate change.