Social Movements as Parsimonious Explanations for Implicit and Explicit Attitude Change

Abstract

Recently, interest in aggregate and population-level implicit and explicit attitudes has opened inquiry into how attitudes relate to sociopolitical phenomenon. This creates an opportunity to examine social movements as dynamic forces with the potential to generate widespread, lasting attitude change. Although collective action remains underexplored as a means of reducing bias, we advance historical and theoretical justifications for doing so. We review recent studies of aggregate attitudes through the lens of social movement theory, proposing movements as a parsimonious explanation for observed patterns. We outline a model for conceptualizing causal pathways between social movements and implicit and explicit attitudes among participants, supporters, bystanders, and opponents. We identify six categories of mechanisms through which movements may transform attitudes: changing society; media representations; intergroup contact and affiliation; empathy, perspective-taking, and reduced intergroup anxiety; social recategorization; and social identification and self-efficacy processes. Generative questions, testable hypotheses, and promising methods for future work are discussed.

International stability and change in explicit and implicit attitudes: An investigation spanning 33 countries, five social groups, and 11 years (2009–2019)

“…Although the patterns of change and stability observed in the present data can be used to inform individual-level theories of social cognitive processes, we hope that they will (also) form the basis of further theorizing situated specifically at the collective level (for some early examples, see Charlesworth & Hatzenbuehler, 2024;Sawyer & Gampa, 2023). Such theories will have to reckon with at least four sets of empirical results from the current work: We believe that collective-level accounts of attitude change will be important to develop because processes of change cannot be assumed to be isomorphic across the individual and collective levels of analysis.…”

“…Using these three axes, the vast literature reviewed above can be said to have focused almost exclusively on short-term, experimentally induced changes at the level of individuals. By contrast, the present project newly expands on all three of these dimensions to ask whether implicit (and explicit) social group attitudes have changed: (a) in the long term (between 2009 and 2019); (b) in response to cultural inputs, such as changes in legal contexts (Ofosu et al, 2019), media representations (Ravary et al, 2019), and large-scale social movements (Sawyer & Gampa, 2023); and (c) at the level of collectives, specifically, aggregating across 33 countries. Critically, processes of change cannot be assumed to be isomorphic across timescales, levels, and sources.…”

Regional Measures of Sexual-Orientation Bias Predict Where Same-Gender Couples Live

“…Places that have more systemic antigay bias and negative associations with sexual minorities are more inhospitable to same-gender couples (e.g., Esposito & Calanchini, 2022). Antigay regions may be undesirable for same-gender couples for the many environmental factors that contribute to regional bias to begin with, including heightened stigma, less accepting community members, and/or lack of community (see Sawyer & Gampa, 2023, for a comprehensive treatment of factors contributing to regional bias for social groups in general). We assume that same-gender couples sense these cues in determining the gay-friendliness of a location, although correlations could indicate that the presence of same-gender couples change a region’s biases, too.…”

“…Given that systemic discrimination and public opinion often go hand in hand, it is plausible that antigay beliefs and attitudes should manifest more strongly in regions with more systemic discrimination (Sawyer & Gampa, 2023). Systemic bias demonstrates that mistreatment is acceptable and can encourage individuals to align with the status quo (Gaucher & Jost, 2011).…”