Why do people join protest movements? Political scientists offer three fancily named categories: expectancy-value (that protests can succeed), relative deprivation (like they’re treated less fairly than others and have a grievance to lodge), and social identity (they identify with a group that they sense is threatened or powerless).
Emotions then amplify the motivation: anger first, with guilt playing a lesser role and contempt kicking in when legitimate channels slam shut and people feel like they have nothing to lose.
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If someone’s marched before, though, there’s another emotion at play: joy. Researchers at the University of Sussex found that the prevailing emotion after a protest was not anger but happiness, because the protesters had felt such a strong sense of belonging, close-knit support, and purposeful action.
Temperament also plays a role: Some people are eager to hit the streets; others are too risk-averse. “And some are willing, given the stakes, to suspend that feeling,” says Kira Hudson Banks, an associate professor of psychology at Saint Louis University who served as a consultant to the Ferguson Commission.
So what pushes them past their usual boundaries?
The purpose of any protest is “to create cognitive dissonance between what you believe and what information is coming to you,” she says, “and to make you uncomfortable enough to potentially make a change.”
In St. Louis, Banks saw that cognitive dissonance kick in after the Jason Stockley verdict followed the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown and Ferguson’s measurable revelations of racial injustice: “If I get that it’s happening and then I see it happen again, I can’t sit at home and just watch.”
Cognitive dissonance is at play for onlookers, too, many of whom might agree with some of the issues raised, yet recoil from the protests themselves. “I think that’s a defensiveness,” Banks says. “It’s hard for people to hold in their heads that it’s not one bad apple—that the whole barrel, the system, needs work. They want to believe that the police are there to serve. The way they rationalize the militarization is that you must be doing something to cause the violence, because in their minds, the police would only be aggressive if necessary. Yet we know that the police get very little training in de-escalation, and they get much more training in escalation.”
She gets a little irritated when someone says, all gooey-voiced, “Oh, be safe!” about visiting an area where there’s an organized protest. Some of that fear might be inexperience, alarm at the chaos people see on TV, or worry about getting swept up or arrested. But Banks thinks there’s also “a socialized fear of masses of black people.” Social psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff studied the relationship between policing and race, and he’s traced societal perceptions of black children as less innocent, more capable of wrongdoing, than white children. In research published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, black children as young as 10 were “more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime.”
So when somebody says “Be safe,” Banks’ mind flips to those misperceptions. “My response is, I’m not scared of black people. I married a black man. I’m a black woman. I think the over-concern with fear and safety is an assumption that the harm that has been done to black people, they will do to someone else. And the reality is, black people have been harmed by racism for centuries, and that has not been their response.”
