Feinberg et al., 2020
Critique by James Ozden
They’ve been sharing an interesting paper by Feinberg, Willer & Kovacheff (2020) which is appropriately titled “The Activist’s Dilemma: Extreme Protest Actions Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements”. The claim here is that extreme actions, like throwing soup at a Van Gogh painting, actually reduce support for the movement (as well as identification with the movement)
- By ensuring that everyone taking part in the study is exposed to either the moderate or radical treatment, we’re essentially controlling for issue salience
- It isn’t how it works in the real world.
- So even though the impact on public support per view is lower in the radical action frame, the number of views (or amount of media coverage) is generally much greater, such that the overall impact is larger.
- This paper doesn’t use a control group with no protests happening for 5 out of 6 experiments
- Social movement groups aren’t usually thinking “Should I protest or should I do nothing?” but rather “Should I protest in a moderate way or in an extreme way?”. So in that sense, a control group might not be particularly informative.