Angry about the past, anxious about the future? Testing two emotion-based pathways to collective action

• Applicant: Dr. Lara Ditrich
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 469266342

Current news as well as recent and modern history are rich with examples of people passionately protesting for different reasons. Such concerted actions aimed at achieving a shared, collective goal are frequently referred to as collective action and a substantial amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to explaining when and why individuals engage in this type of behavior. Usually, protests emerge when individuals face collective discrepancies (i.e., undesirable and unacceptable conditions faced by a larger number of people). To date, research has mainly focused on situations in which members of a certain group evaluate their group’s current or past treatment as unjust. However, what previous research has neglected is that individuals faced with a collective discrepancy may not only focus on how this situation emerged (i.e., on past treatment) but also on the discrepancy’s possible negative future consequences. While a focus on past unjust treatment is associated with anger (which fosters collective action), a focus on possible negative consequences is associated with anxiety, an emotion that has thus far received scant scientific attention in collective action research. Therefore, the goal of the present project is to develop and test a more integrative model of collective action, adding anxiety and the focus on future developments to existing models. This model covers the impact of different aspects of a collective discrepancy (past treatment vs. future consequences) on collective action, the processes underlying this impact, and different potential aims collective action may serve. The research program experimentally and longitudinally tests the idea that when faced with a collective discrepancy, individuals’ emotional responses and, consequently, the goals (confrontation vs. problem-resolution) they strive to achieve through collective action will depend on which aspect of the discrepancy they focus on. By testing this prediction, this project provides new insights into the causes and mechanisms that underly social change processes, specifically shedding light on the important role emotions play in shaping these processes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants