Protesters as 'Passionate Economists' by Van Zomeren et al. (2012) - Article

Emotion and collective action

The concept of emotion is becoming more popular in research on collective action against collective disadvantage. Researchers are looking at how emotion can motivate people to participate in collective action. Many studies have shown that anger stimulates people to act against the collective disadvantage caused by prejudice. The people who took the streets during the protests in the Arab world in the winter of 2011, were also fuelled by anger. It seems that anger and collective action can also enforce social change. People have for a long time thought that emotion is to irrational to motivate the rational choice to take part in collective action. For a long time, anger has also been seen as a destructive response that enhances rage. This kept many researchers from studying emotion and anger in collective action. Nowadays, the view on emotion is that it is rational basis for deciding to act. According to the writers of the text, researchers must treat protesters as passionate economists. The writers want to offer a dynamic dual pathway model. This model sees collective action as an form to cope with collective disadvantage. This model sees group-based anger as a form of problem-focused approach coping. This model builds on previous work, but it also moves beyond it. It specifies how seeing collective action as an approach form of coping enables the collective action theory as an integrative form and it also shows the dynamic relationship between problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping in collective disadvantage.

Three approaches

People often join collective action, because they think that this will help them improve the conditions of the group as a whole. However, the past couple of decades, many explanations have been put in the collective action theories and the writers also continue to integrate work from different psychological studies and phenomena in this theory. What’s different between these writers and others, is that they use a unifying notion of coping in order to theoretically integrate the concepts that are given by different approaches.

Individual economists

The first rationalist theory of collective action states that collective action is a social dilemma for an individual, because an individual has to put in effort to achieve collective rewards. The maximum utility of this individual will be achieved by staying inactive, so he won’t have individual costs, and hoping that other group members will act so he can reap his share of the collective benefits. In this theory, no role for emotion was present. This theory was popular in the resource mobilization domain. Recent versions of these resource mobilization theory have a role for subjective utility in collective action. Some argue that people think about the subjective value of their goals for collective action in comparison to the expectancy that they will meet these goals. The people who participate in collective action value being with disadvantaged others more and have a higher expectancy of social rewards as result of this action than people who don’t participate in collective action. People who expect that collective action will bring about economic changes are also more willing to participate in collective action. There are some context in which individuals engage in collective action to improve the individual outcomes, but a person’s actions will probably not lead to collective benefit if other people of the group don’t act. Group efficacy beliefs are beliefs that group members have about that a group problem can be solved when the group works together. Many studies have found group efficacy beliefs to be a predictor of collective action. However, not much work has focused on how these group efficacy beliefs come about.

Passionate group members

According to the classic resource mobilization perspective, relative deprivation can’t really explain the rational choice to join collective actions. According to the relative deprivation theory, feelings of relative deprivation develop on the basis of social comparison. When groups feel deprived after the comparison to other groups, collective action will be likely. Feelings of interpersonal deprivation are not good predictors of collective actions. However, it has not been made clear what these feelings of group deprivation are. The writers of this article think that anger is a good candidate. Another predictor of collective action is the degree of group identity. The social identity theory also looks at the perception of group members about the illegitimacy of their disadvantage and this is seen as a predictor of collective action. Studies have shown that perceived group injustice predicted collective action tendencies. However, the social identity theory doesn’t focus on the specific emotion of group-based anger.

An integrative model

The literature on collective action comes from two traditions that are somewhat contrasting. The individual economist approach looks at the belief in group efficacy and the presence or absence of instrumental resources and thinks these will enable collective action. The passionate group members approach puts more emphasis on group identity, perceptions of injustice and feelings of group deprivation. To examine why some people have undertaken collective action, different explanations can be examined. However, these are not integrated models and the writers of this article really think there should be one. They believe that coping should be used to enable the integration of different explanations of collective action.

The dual pathway model

A figure of this model can be found on page 184 in the article. The dual pathway model states that collective disadvantage is a demand with which people want to cope. Collective action can be seen as a way to cope with collective disadvantage. Individuals do not only cope with their individual disadvantage, but also with the disadvantage of their group. collective action is designed to change a person’s circumstances and it is therefore approach coping. The model assumes that group goals can be seen as achievable. Cognitive appraisal is important in people’s coping efforts. Both primary and secondary appraisal guide coping. The former looks at the individual’s interpretation of the relevance that collective disadvantage has for the self, whether this self is the individual self or the group self. The latter is the individual’s interpretation of the circumstances of collective disadvantage and how this person thinks he or she can effectively cope with it.

People use their primary appraisal to interpret whether an event has enough self-relevancy to initiate coping efforts. An event is relevant if it has to do with an aspect of one’s ego or if it has to do with a specific goal. The group identity of individuals must become relevant to initiate coping efforts. People must see themselves as member of a disadvantaged group, otherwise their collective responses will not come about. The collective nature of an event makes social identity salient and because of this, people can self-categorize as a group member. People who highly identity with their group have a chronic salient group identity and they can therefore easily self-categorize as a group member.

The appraisal of blame for unfairness is important in approach coping. People need to judge who is to blame for unfairness. Blaming someone for injustice has been seen as the fundamental basis of anger. When group members do not blame an external agent for their unfair disadvantage, they won’t feel anger, but other negative emotions like sadness and dissatisfaction. In collective disadvantage situations, a person can make the primary appraisal that his/her group’s disadvantage is collective and important to the self. A secondary appraisal can also be made and one example is that this person sees the collective disadvantage as unfair and blames an external agent for it. These two patterns of appraisal will make anger more likely and because of this, approach coping efforts in the form of collective action will become more likely. This type of coping is called emotion-focused coping, because emotion motivates the coping efforts. Anger is an approach emotion and thus, this type of coping can be called emotion-focused approach coping.

The dual pathway model sees the appraisal of external blame for unfair collective disadvantage as an antecedent of emotion-focused approach coping. One coping resource is emotional social support and this can best be given by someone who shares the same circumstances. This external blame of an agent leads to collective action through group-based anger. In the model, high coping potential is an important antecedent of problem-focused approach coping. Seeing the coping potential as high will lead to collective action, via group efficacy beliefs. Also, the more willing other people are to alter the group’s collective disadvantage, the higher the perceived group efficacy will be. High group-efficacy beliefs will result in a higher willingness to undertake collective action. The emotion-focused and the problem-focused pathways of coping are complementary.

The dual pathway model is dynamic, because appraisal feeds into coping and coping feeds back into reappraisal. People continue to keep coping as long as it is seen as necessary. The dual pathway model predicts that group identity facilitates emotion-focused approach coping. This model thinks that group identity moderates problem-focused approach coping. When the group identity is less relevant to a person, his/her group efficacy beliefs become more predictive of his/her willingness to undertake collective action. The model also predicts that group efficacy beliefs increase group identification because of collective action. It also predicts that undertaking collective action will empower people by increasing their coping potential. The dynamic character of this model is important, because it sees group members as active co-constructors of their realities. The writers of this article have put this model to the test in their own studies and found support for it. Support for this model has also been found in other sources.

Future studies could look more into group identity to find out which aspects of this identity can be seen as primary appraisal and which can be seen as secondary appraisal of coping. Future research could also look more into the reappraisal of threat in coping efforts. The practical implications of the dual pathway model are that it’s important to increase an individual’s self-relevance of his/her group identity. Another implication is to enhance the coping resources. That’s because accumulating coping resources mobilize people for collective action. One can stimulate people to make certain reappraisals (increase emotional support and the appraised unfairness of collective disadvantage or increase instrumental support and therefore also group efficacy beliefs) in order to join collective action. The issue of leadership has not been studied in connection to this model. However, the model does show which pathways could be appealed to by a leader. Future research should combine this dual pathway model with leadership. Another implication of this study is that is shows how collective action can be prevented from occurring. All the elements that enhance the chances of collective action should be taken away in order to prevent collective action. So, collective action will be unlikely when collective disadvantage is not seen as self-relevant, when the group efficacy beliefs about social change are low and when there is nobody to blame for the unfairness of collective disadvantage. The advantaged who want to prevent social change, could try to prevent collective action from happening by using those three things.