The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists by Lisa Mueller

Author:Lisa Mueller [Mueller, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Activism & Social Justice, Political Science, Civil Rights, Research
ISBN: 9780807013489
Google: Yv3vEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0CNR6H82R
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2024-08-19T22:00:00+00:00

MAKE YOUR COALITION MIND-FRIENDLY

Cognitive science shows us why the lack of a cohesive message turned out to be a fatal flaw for the Women’s March coalition. Cohesive messages, which stick to the main point, are easier for our brains to comprehend than scrambled messages, which stray from the main point.42 Think back to the last time you read a poorly written article, where the paragraphs meandered away from topic sentences and ideas were haphazardly sprinkled throughout the text. It probably made your head hurt, especially if the article was on a subject that was unfamiliar to you. Your headache resulted from cohesion gaps, which occur when pieces of text have little overlap and force you to fill in the connections with your own knowledge.43 Research shows that cohesive texts are more persuasive than aimless texts because they are less taxing for the brain to process.44

Protests are a kind of text: powerholders “read” them—through signs, chants, apparel, and social media posts—and then decide whether to give protesters what they want. Powerholders can’t grant demands that they can’t understand. The Women’s March, with its sundry stakeholders and grievances, was much less mind-friendly than the March for Life, with its unambiguous message. Republican politicians knew exactly what to do to appease their constituents: write state laws restricting abortion and seat judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade. Democratic politicians had no equivalent guidelines; their constituents were demanding the kitchen sink.

The divergent outcomes of the Women’s March and the March for Life are consistent with the hypothesis that more cohesive demands make an activist coalition more likely to win concessions. However, it’s easy to cherry-pick cases to support a theory. After attending the Women’s March and the March for Life, I wanted more conclusive evidence before advising readers to invest a ton of energy in uniting their coalitions around a central message. By “conclusive,” I mean a) generalizable and b) causal: Do cohesive demands correspond with better outcomes across many protests, not just the two I happened to attend in Washington? And if so, does crowd cohesion actually cause success, or just correlate with it? Conclusive studies didn’t exist yet, so I became my own detective.45

To produce generalizable evidence, I compiled a database of ninety-seven protests in Europe and the Americas between 2009 and 2014. The protests were nominally about a host of issues, from climate change and gay pride to pensions and corruption. However, we’ve seen that it’s difficult to tell what a protest is really about just by the protest’s name, especially when the event is orchestrated by a coalition of different groups. As we saw in Dana Fisher’s surveys, activists who attend a “gun control” rally or a “women’s march” might be there for all sorts of reasons. Luckily, a consortium of European researchers surveyed participants at each of these ninety-seven protests on why they had attended. I just needed to aggregate the responses into a measure of crowd cohesion. To do that, I used artificial intelligence that transformed raw survey responses (e.

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