MARCAS DE FABRICA

Works are of value only if they give rise to better ones. (William Von Humboldt, a letter

to Charles Darwin, 1839)

n this thesis I have drawn on current developments in the social psychology of emotion, automaticity, and mental simulation in order to add to current perspectives on political action and social change. As such, my approach has been eclectic both theoretically and methodologically. Separately, these efforts represent three independent programs of research each with its own message, and each situated in a broader area of social psychological knowledge. Taken together, they point towards three general conclusions. First, political action and social change are inherently emotional. That is, one could easily conceptualise the moral emotions (Haidt, 2003; Prinz & Nichols, 2010) as the “political emotions”; something that has not escaped political scientists in the social movement scholarship (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001; Jasper, 1998). This idea is also consistent with our second conclusion; automatic processes may shape the way we think about and respond to political issues. Here automatic, unintended, and uncontrolled social cognition may influence what is a characteristically deliberative behavior (i.e., political action). This conclusion could all too easily lead to a view of political action and social change, or the lack thereof, as inevitable, automatic processes that are devoid from human agency and free will (see Jost, Pietrzak, Liviatan, Mandisodza, & Napier, 2008). This relates to an ideology in social psychological theorising that sees conformity and the maintenance of the status quo as default psychological phenomena (see Haslam & Reicher, 2006; Reicher & Haslam, 2006; Turner, 2006). This is not a view that I hold, and it is not, more importantly, one that the data

support. The dual process approach to political action that I have taken here suggests that both

automatic and controlled processes play a role in the social behaviors that determine social change or maintenance. As our final conclusion makes clear, human agency, deliberative thought, and “freedom dreams” are very much at the heart of a social psychology of political action and social change; the human capacity to imagine alternative social orders or realities may be one of the most important factors determining political action and social change. Moreover, the ability to imagine or to “have a dream” qualifies how factors like emotion and efficacy affect political action.

Taken together, these conclusions raise several issues, questions, and areas for future work. Rather than repeating the discussion from Chapters 2-4, I will use the remaining space to point towards future work that follows logically from the main conclusions and limitations of the thesis. First, in Chapter 2 we found that competence and legitimate status engendered admiration, and that admiration towards dominant parties and authority inhibited progressive political action aimed at social change. However, we found that when admiration was targeted at subversive “heroes” it engendered action aimed at progressive social change. Nevertheless, we did not examine the antecedents of this type of admiration. Although appraisal theories of emotion suggest that the appraisal components of admiration should be the same in both cases (Lazarus, 1991), it may be the case that legitimacy or moral excellence played more of a role in eliciting emotion in the case of the subversives. This may follow given that Chinese protestors where not effective in bring about democracy in China. In this sense they were not competent (or sufficiently powerful). However, confronting a tank with one’s bare hands may lead to admiration because of the virtuous and moral aspects of one’s actions. As such, it may be moral excellence that is driving this admiration (Haidt & Algoe, 2004). Future work would do well to explore whether different antecedents of admiration have different predictive power when it comes to specific types of action.

Second, given that imagination of social change goals can qualify the affect of anger and efficacy on political action, could they also qualify the role of automatic attitudes? Future

work would do well to explore this. One might expect that if imagination leads to motivation for social change then automatic attitudes may play less of a role in predicting political action when people can (vs. cannot) imagine an alternative social order. In addition, future work would do well to explore whether the relationship between political action and moral emotions, automatic attitudes, and social change goals vary as a function of the type of political action. For instance, perhaps moral emotions are more important in predicting “non- normative” vs. “normative” political actions (Wright, 2001b). While I have shown that automatic protest attitudes are associated with anger over group grievances, it would be interesting to examine whether protest attitudes influence sympathy and admiration. Such efforts may help to highlight how such automatic attitudes influence emotion. It may be the case that automatic attitudes have to be conceptually relevant to influence an emotion. For example, it could be the case that automatic attitudes towards power, status, competence, warmth, and morality could predict admiration towards authorities and subversives. This line of reasoning fits with appraisal tendencies approaches (Lerner & Keltner, 2000).

Finally, in Chapter 4 we developed the notion of social changes goals to add specificity to the SIT’s cognitive alternatives and demonstrated the utility of such an approach. However, one very big question remains; what gets people to adopt or imagine a particular social change goal like revolution or collective mobility in the first place? And how does this relate to automaticity and emotion? In what follows I develop a typology of social change goals in order to sketch out a conceptual answer to these questions. I hope that this typology will serve to focus interests on different types of social change goal.