Just because the average person disapproves of a protest tactic doesn’t mean that the tactic doesn’t work. Roger Hallam’s “Designing the Revolution” series outlines the thought process underlying disruptive actions like the infamous soup-throwing protests. Reasonable people may disagree (I disagree with quite a few things he says), but if you don’t know the arguments, any objection is going to miss the point. To be clear, PauseAI does not endorse or engage in disruptive civil disobedience, but I discuss it here to illustrate some broader points. Anyways, “Designing the Revolution” is very long, so here’s a tl/dr:
If the public response is: “I’m all for the cause those protestors are advocating, but I can’t stand their methods”...notice that the first half of this statement was approval of the only thing that matters—approval of the cause itself.
Social movements are critical agents of change that vary greatly in both tactics and popular support. Prior work shows that extreme protest tactics – actions that are highly counter-normative, disruptive, or harmful to others, including inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and damaging property – are effective for gaining publicity. However, we find across three experiments that extreme protest tactics decreased popular support for a given cause because they reduced feelings of identification with the movement. Though this effect obtained in tests of popular responses to extreme tactics used by animal rights, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Trump protests (Studies 1-3), we found that self-identified political activists were willing to use extreme tactics because they believed them to be effective for recruiting popular support (Studies 4a & 4b). The activist’s dilemma – wherein tactics that raise awareness also tend to reduce popular support – highlights a key challenge faced by social movements struggling to affect progressive change.
Excerpt:
Study 1. Participants read about a fictional animal rights activist group called Free the Vulnerable (FTV). The extremity of the movement’s protest behavior was manipulated at three levels: Moderate Protest, Extreme Protest, or Highly Extreme Protest conditions. The protesters in the two extreme protest conditions engaged in unlawful activities (e.g., breaking into an animal testing facility) modeled after protest activities of real-life activists, while the activists in the Moderate Protest condition peacefully marched in protest. [...] After participants read their assigned article, they completed measures of perceived extremity, social identification with the movement and support for it.
Important results: Social identification with the movement was 2.70, 2.48, 2.28 for moderate, extreme, and highly extreme protest conditions respectively. Support for the movement: 3.07, 2.60, 2.62.
Read more of the paper to see more similar results. It is nice to see them. For example, in the study with fictional BLM protests:
These results suggest that both African Americans and non-African Americans perceived protesters as more extreme and felt less support for them in the Extreme Protest condition.
[...] Thus, as with participant race, these results suggest that participants, regardless of their political ideology, reacted negatively to extreme protests.
And the study with fictional anti-Trump protests:
Together, these results suggest that regardless of pre-existing attitudes regarding Trump’s candidacy, participants in the Extreme Protest condition viewed the protesters as more extreme and reported less support for the movement.
Thanks for the link! It’s important to distinguish here between:
(1) support for the movement, (2) support for the cause, and (3) active support for the movement (i.e. attracting other activists to show up at future demonstrations)
Most of the paper focuses on 1, and also on activist’s beliefs about the impact of their actions. I am more interested in 2 and 3. To be fair, the paper gives some evidence for detrimental impacts on 2 in the Trump example. It’s not clear, however, whether the nature of the cause matters here. Support for Trump is highly polarized and entangled with culture, whereas global warming (Hallam’s cause) and AI risk (PauseAI’s) have relatively broad but frustratingly lukewarm public support. There are also many other factors when looking past short-term onlooker sentiment to the larger question of affecting social change, which the paper readily admits in the Discussion section. I’d list these points, but they largely overlap with the points I made in my post...though it was interesting to see how much was speculative. More research is needed.
In any case, I bring up the extreme case to illustrate that the issue is far more nuanced than “regular people get squeamish—net negative!” This is actually somewhat irrelevant to PauseAI in particular, because most of our actions are around public education and lobbying, and even the protests are legal and non-disruptive. I’ve been in two myself and have seen nothing but positive sentiment from onlookers (with the exception of the occasional “good luck with that!” snark). The hard part with all of these is getting people to show up. (This last paragraph is not a rebuttal to anything you have said, it’s a reminder of context)
But that approval may have predated the protest, and might have been reduced by it. Have you encountered this research? “Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements”. Abstract:
Excerpt:
Important results: Social identification with the movement was 2.70, 2.48, 2.28 for moderate, extreme, and highly extreme protest conditions respectively. Support for the movement: 3.07, 2.60, 2.62.
Read more of the paper to see more similar results. It is nice to see them. For example, in the study with fictional BLM protests:
And the study with fictional anti-Trump protests:
Thanks for the link! It’s important to distinguish here between:
(1) support for the movement,
(2) support for the cause, and
(3) active support for the movement (i.e. attracting other activists to show up at future demonstrations)
Most of the paper focuses on 1, and also on activist’s beliefs about the impact of their actions. I am more interested in 2 and 3. To be fair, the paper gives some evidence for detrimental impacts on 2 in the Trump example. It’s not clear, however, whether the nature of the cause matters here. Support for Trump is highly polarized and entangled with culture, whereas global warming (Hallam’s cause) and AI risk (PauseAI’s) have relatively broad but frustratingly lukewarm public support. There are also many other factors when looking past short-term onlooker sentiment to the larger question of affecting social change, which the paper readily admits in the Discussion section. I’d list these points, but they largely overlap with the points I made in my post...though it was interesting to see how much was speculative. More research is needed.
In any case, I bring up the extreme case to illustrate that the issue is far more nuanced than “regular people get squeamish—net negative!” This is actually somewhat irrelevant to PauseAI in particular, because most of our actions are around public education and lobbying, and even the protests are legal and non-disruptive. I’ve been in two myself and have seen nothing but positive sentiment from onlookers (with the exception of the occasional “good luck with that!” snark). The hard part with all of these is getting people to show up. (This last paragraph is not a rebuttal to anything you have said, it’s a reminder of context)