For a powerful protest, emotions matter

When it comes to driving social change, the voices of the marginalised aren't always enough on their own. Building support for such causes, from LGBT+ rights to Black Lives Matter, sometimes requires persuasion — turning others into allies who will fight for change too.

Yet doing so effectively, a new study suggests, might require more than just crafting the right message. Instead, writes Hakan Çakmak and colleagues in Political Psychology, persuasion is also about emotions, and who is expressing them. The results highlight the interplay between social status, expressions of emotion, and allyship, potentially giving steer to activists aiming to win new supporters.

In the first study, 1,039 heterosexual participants read a mock news article about protests against hate crimes targeting the LGBT+ community. They were randomly assigned to one of three versions of the article: one where the protestors expressed fear, one where they expressed anger, and one where no emotional expression was mentioned. Participants then rated their support for policy reforms to protect the LGBT+ community and their own resistance to social change.

The emotion that protestors expressed made a significant difference to how much support they received from participants — though this varied by participants' own openness to social change. For those highly resistant to change, protestors expressing fear generated significantly more support than those expressing anger or no emotion at all. Those who were less resistant to change were no more or less persuaded by any particular emotional expression.

Having established that different kinds of emotions affect resistant audiences, the team turned their attention to whether emotional expressions by allies of protestors would yield similar results. To do so, 1,047 heterosexual participants read the same news story about an anti-hate crime demonstration — only this time, those protesting were heterosexual allies, not members of the LGBT+ community. Participants then took part in the same measures as in the first study.

Here, anger proved more effective in convincing those resistant to change to lend their support than fear or no emotion. Again, those not resistant to social change were not additionally swayed by emotions of those asking for support.

The team suggests that these differing results reflect the social status of LGBT+ community members and allies respectively. Fear, they argue, is more closely associated with lower perceived power, while anger signals an authority associated with high-status allies. This congruence between the emotional expressions and the perceived status of the groups may help explain why fear was more persuasive for marginalised protestors, while anger was more effective for allies: the emotions aligned with audience expectations of each group.

This means that the effectiveness of particular emotional expressions in protests is not universal, but depends instead on how audiences perceive the power and legitimacy of the messenger, shaping their willingness to support the cause.

Future research could more closely explore the traits associated with different groups, and how they might drive these effects; potential mechanisms such as stereotypes about low-status groups or moral judgements about high-status allies were not explored in this study.

The team also acknowledges that text-based communication may not fully capture the power of emotional expression. In-person or video demonstrations, where tone and facial expressions are visible, are likely to be much more powerful and may provide further insight into this phenomenon.

Overall, though, the results give useful insight for those wanting to design more effective protest strategies, and underlines the central role of emotions in persuasive communications. When it comes to driving social change, results are not just about what you express, but how you express it.

Read the paper in full:
Hakan Çakmak, Kara, E., & İrem Sakarya. (2024). Angry allies and fearful protesters: Communicating the right emotion during non‐normative non‐violent protests increases support for concessions among resistant high‐status group members. Political Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.13050

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