What are the most effective collective actions that social protest movements can or should undertake in the context of deep societal conflict and polarization? CASBS fellows Eran Halperin (2022-23) & Robb Willer (2012-13, 2020-21) compare their cross-national research findings and explore Halperin's real-time applied work with the dramatic, ongoing protests in Israel.
What are the most effective collective actions that social protest movements can or should undertake in the context of deep societal conflict and polarization? CASBS fellows Eran Halperin (2022-23) & Robb Willer (2012-13, 2020-21) compare their cross-national research findings and explore Halperin's real-time applied work with the dramatic, ongoing protests in Israel.
ERAN HALPERIN links:
Psychology of Intergroup Conflict and Reconciliation Lab (PCIL)
Halperin on Google Scholar
aChord: Social Psychology for Social Change
ROBB WILLER links:
Willer's Stanford faculty page
Willer's personal web page
Polarization and Social Change Lab
Willer on Google Scholar
Article in JPSP, "The Activist's Dilemma" (2020)
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University
CASBS:website|Twitter|YouTube|LinkedIn|podcast|latest newsletter|signup|outreach
Follow the CASBS webcast series,Social Science for a World in Crisis
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Have you ever wondered what makes a successful protest movement? In the context of political conflict and polarization, what does it take to shift people's beliefs and inspire action in service of social change? In this episode of Human Centered, we get to the heart of these questions by bringing into conversation two CASBS fellows with a deep and varied expertise on these matters, Eran Halperin and Robb Willer.
Halperin is a 2022 to 23 CASBS fellow and is a social psychologist based at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he heads the psychology of intergroup conflict and reconciliation lab. His research integrates psychological and political theories to investigate causal factors driving intergroup conflict and develop new approaches for modifying the psychological roots of intolerance, exclusion and intergroup violence. The unique case of Israeli society in general and that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular motivates much of his work.
And as you're about to hear, in recent months, he has been in a unique position to apply research on the ground in real time, as few social scientists are ever in a position to do. Robb Willer has been a CASBS fellow twice, in 2012 to 2013 and again in 2020 to 2021. He is a professor of sociology here at Stanford University, where he also directs the Polarization and Social Change Lab.
He focuses on the social forces that bring people together and drive them apart. He's applied his work mainly in the context of political attitudes in the United States, investigating techniques for overcoming polarization, building political consensus, and using political psychology to construct persuasive messaging. In the episode notes, we'll link to some of the key works that Halperin and Willer and their collaborators have produced that relate to today's topics. And we'll also throw in links to key organizations they each affiliate with.
What does it mean for a protest to be effective? How should it be measured? What is the role of violence or short of that? What Halperin refers to as constructive disruption? Does the current evidence allow us to generalize across countries?
And are they optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects for positive social change in Israel and the United States? Their thoughts may surprise you.
And a note to listeners, this conversation was recorded on May 31, 2023, during the height of the judicial reform protest occurring in Israel. Since then, there have obviously been a lot of new developments in the conflict. So keep that in mind, and we recommend you stay up to date with the unfolding situation there. So let's listen in to Eran and Robb's conversation.
Rob Willer: Okay, so, Eran, we've been friends for a while and colleagues for even longer than that, and I've been a fan of your work for longer than you probably know, more than a decade. And so it's been great to have you here at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences this year, and it's going to be great to have a conversation with you about our respective research on social movements. So maybe a good way to kick things off would be to invite you to briefly introduce yourself and offer some thoughts on how you came to study collective action and social movements.
Eran Halperin: Wow, thank you, Robb. Such a pleasure to be here with you. I'm really looking forward to this discussion.
I'll say, you know, on my side, that I've been interested in social change, broadly speaking, for many years. And what we've been doing in our lab in different ways, on different levels, is mainly asking questions about change. I mean, how do you change people's emotions?
How do you change people's attitudes? How do you change this very, very difficult situations of conflicts? In my case, you know, coming from the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So it's mainly how do you change people's, I usually call it, hearts and minds of people who are involved in conflicts for so many years. And I think that one thing that I've learned throughout the years is that especially when we talk about the high-power groups, the groups that hold most of the privilege and power in the context of conflict, it's a sad fact, I think, but they don't give up their power just out of goodwill or their moral values in most cases, at least for my, I don't think it's not an empirical finding, but that's my view of the way things are happening. And if that's true, then when we think about macro level changes in hierarchy, in societies, collective action must be involved.
So it's not enough to teach people, to train people, to try and convince people, something more proactive has to be involved in the process of creating large scale changes in societies. And this is when my study moved, and actually I'm rather new in this area. So for many years, I've been studying interventions for change in terms of attitudes and emotions.
But my study on collective action as a vehicle for change has started only, I would say, four years ago or five years ago. And since then, it has became one of the main things that we're doing in our lab. And the main focus is on asking, what can make collective action effective?
And maybe we'll talk about it later, because I think that it's very, very much involved to your work and to the fascinating work that you've been doing in your lab throughout the years. I think that you've started studying collective action or social movements way before I started doing some of this work. And you've done it also in many different contexts and about different social and political questions.
So I'm really, really curious to hear, first of all, what led you to study these questions, questions related to social movements and collective action? And also maybe what do you find most interesting in this area right now?
Rob Willer: Yeah, yeah. No, I'd love to dig into it. One thing, if you don't mind, before you move off of you, Eran, I was wondering if you'd mind if I asked what personally brought you to the study of collective action? If you wouldn't mind, did you have personal experiences that made it really matter to you? Was it just an inevitability of growing up in the Israeli-Palestinian context? If you wouldn't mind, I'd be super curious to hear your own personal story a little bit.
Eran Halperin: No, I'm happy to talk about it. I will say that what led me to study collective action is basically what led me to study questions about change and more specifically, questions about change in the context of conflicts. I think that the major personal event that I've experienced is, I think it was 25 years ago. I'm getting old, Robb, if it's 25 years ago.
Rob Willer: I couldn't tell.
Eran Halperin: It’s good that it's a podcast. No one can see us. You can say that I look much younger.
Rob Willer: You don't have to say it was 25 years ago. They don’t know.
Eran Halperin: So 25 years ago, I was an officer in a special unit in the Israeli army and I was very seriously injured in a, I often call it in a non-important event in the history of this conflict, which was important only for me and probably for my family. But I was injured in Lebanon as part of a militant encounter between Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli army. I was hospitalized for three months in an ER and then for almost four years in a rehabilitation center.
And again, I can talk about it more, but I think that the more important thing here is that the first and most important thing that I got from this entire experience was my understanding or sense that we simply cannot accept the reality as it is. We cannot accept it. One of the things that happened to people who are, you know, I was born into a conflict and, you know, my father was born into a conflict and my father was, you know, was part of the Israeli Army and we lost some friends in the fighting and I have Palestinian friends who sacrificed much more than us.
But one of the most, I would say, one of the most terrible things that happened to people in this context is that you simply get used to it. You know, one of the one of the fascinating pieces of data is that there's this happiness measure of, you know, cross national happiness measure. And Israeli society is ranked around the top five scores in the happiness measure around the world.
And you ask yourself, what I mean, something doesn't make sense here. You know, a society that experienced conflict and there are missiles on Tel Aviv every year and it's part of an occupation and makes the Palestinian life miserable. How can people be so happy?
And they can be so happy because they get used to it and because that's life. And my personal experience mainly led me to realize that we simply cannot accept this as, you know, as something that we should accept. And that was the first thing.
And the second thing was that I felt like, you know, we keep on trying to do the same things and are surprised that they provide the same result again and again. I think that it was Einstein who said this brilliant thing and that we need to be more creative, we need to be more deep, we need to be more sophisticated in trying to figure out ways to create change. And this is what led me to study psychology, like to understand that maybe the problem is not, you know, it's not a problem of ideology, of interest in the Israeli-Palestinian case.
It's not really the problem of, you know, where the border would be. It's a problem of people's emotions, their narratives, their biases, their societal beliefs. And if this is the problem, so this is also where we should look for the solution.
And collective action or understanding, you know, what can lead people to engage in action and what can make their action effective. And how can we motivate them through their emotions, their beliefs, their narratives? And how can we make their action or to help them in making their action very accurate in terms of, and when I say accurate in terms of being effective, that's at least, you know, I'm not sure that I'm doing the right thing in terms of, you know, bringing world peace and everything would be great, but at least from my subjective perspective, that's maybe something that wasn't tried enough in this context.
So it's been a longer answer than I wanted to give.
Rob Willer: No, thanks for sharing your story. It's meaningful and it shows how this area has real stakes for you. So my own background in social movements and collective action came from, I guess, a very specific subcultural space in American activism, which is organized labor.
And so I had worked as a union organizer in graduate school. And this was my primary collective action experience to that point in since, you know, though I've been active in other sorts of social movements in different capacities. But that's a very pragmatic activist subculture.
And it's in part a result of structure, of like there's a structure to union organizing in the United States context is actually heavily regimented. In most cases, most of the time people are operating through the National Labor Relations Board, which creates like an election. And, you know, it it creates a certain defined kind of crisp, clear set of strategic decisions.
And sometimes some easy ones, you know, some sometimes it's quite clear what you have to do. And it's quite clear what would not be effective. And there's also a sort of default orientation in organized labor that's sort of like an openness and an approach of persuasion and greeting people who do not yet agree with you.
And so where some activist spaces, people encounter somebody who disagrees with them, and they might, you know, tell them to fuck off, you know, like in the union organizing context, you're like, Oh, you don't agree with me. Great. Let's get together and talk because we really need you in the union.
You know, and that's that's what you kind of have to do structurally, because you're trying to you're trying to win an election in the context of a of a workplace. And so that was sort of my cultural background as an activist. And then I got I wound up spending, you know, more than a decade in some of the most liberal progressive communities in America.
So like Ithaca, New York, Berkeley, California, San Francisco, you know, communities I love and really enjoyed being in as, you know, a progressive that kind of fit well in these places. But I also got a pretty up close view of how when you're in an ideologically homogenous environment, it has major advantages and disadvantages for mobilization. So on the one hand, you really kind of want ideological homogeneity for mobilization.
You want to get some like minded people together to try to change what's going on. You know, a lot of great ideas in America have come out of the San Francisco Bay Area, you know, like an ability to think 50 years ahead of other folks. You know, I would argue it's been endemic to this place, which I'm not bored of, so I can just compliment this place.
I'm adopted. And so that ideological homogeneity can be like a recipe for social change. Get a bunch of people together and they can think like, what do we think?
You know, and what should we think? You know, and they get that criticism and doubt out of their collective mind, you know. But it also can be a strategic disadvantage because you lose the ability to entertain the perspective of those who have not joined you yet.
And so when it comes to tactics and strategy, it can sometimes drive you towards approaches that outside of your, you know, your ideological enclave are going to maybe look unpersuasive or even ridiculous, you know. And you can be inadvertently, you might have the next great idea society ought to listen to, but the way you prosecute it could be quite ineffective. And so I, you know, as an example, I remember, I hope I'm going to get this right, but there was a code pink protest of the Marine Recruitment Center in downtown Berkeley in kind of the late stages of the Iraq War.
And, you know, I was I was against the Iraq War. It was an active protester in the early stages. And Berkeley was, you know, also very much against the Iraq War, and there was this kind of tacit standoff happening between the Marine Recruitment folks and then and the city of Berkeley.
And so the Berkeley City Council in this kind of hilarious culture wars move reserved an official parking place for Code Pink in front of the Marine Recruitment Center. So to make as convenient as possible their protesting of the Marine Recruitment. And I remember watching on the national news at one point when these protests were escalating, a bunch of Code Pink folks like locked arms blocking the door to the Marine Recruitment Center trying to stop people from recruiting people to this what I thought was a quite unjust war, you know.
And so I'm with them, you know, and I'm watching this on television, and they're kind of singing songs, but they're kind of dressed sort of like rag tag. They're not necessarily singing the same song. And then the Marines show up and they're like cleanly dressed in suits, you know, and they're just saying like, I am just trying to go to work.
I am only trying to go to work and the protesters are getting kind of kind of pushy, maybe not violent per se, but like shoving a little bit. And they're like trying to just walk through the door and they're like, I am only trying to go to my workplace. That's it.
And I was like, oh, my God, like we made them look like the civil rights protesters. We made them look like the pacifist anti-war protesters. And they're going to work to recruit people to fight on the front lines of an unjust war.
And how did we lose this narrative in the way we did the optics of it? And I remember around that time kind of thinking that this is someone I really wanted to study of how we could try to get both parts of social change strategy, right? Like the great ideas and the tactics.
Eran Halperin: That's really interesting. And then in a way, what you're saying is that the I mean, you can be very you can feel like you're very right and just and maybe even motivate others from your own community to join you. But then your actual effect on others is might be questionable.
Rob Willer: Right.
Eran Halperin: Right.
Rob Willer: Yeah.
Eran Halperin: And then and then the question is what should be done in order to be effective or, you know, now continuing other conversations that we had during this year. What does it mean to be effective when we talk about social movement, when we talk about collective action? I think that there's there are serious questions about what does it mean to be effective?
I mean, some people would say effectiveness means, I mean, you know, attracting many, many people to support the protest or to join the protest. So effective protest would be a protest that many people want to join or that many people would would support. And I think that what I've heard you saying right now is you can create a protest that would be would would look great for people who anyway support the values or or the ideas of the protest.
But would almost look ridiculous or ineffective for people on the other side. And then the question of, you know, what exactly do you want to achieve in the protest? I think that that's one of the most important questions that I know that you've asked in in your research. And we've asked in our research in many ways. One thing that I can offer now, tell me if it's OK with you. Maybe to deal with this question of effectiveness, we can like introduce the case study of what's happening now in Israel in terms of the protest and our involvement in the protest.
And then ask, you know, what made this protest effective or what can prevent it from from being effective? And then we can we can think about the different different parameters or different tactics.
Rob Willer: Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. Do you mind talking a little bit about the research you've been doing in the Israeli-Palestinian context and in recent months?
Eran Halperin: OK, so I'll say as a background that I think that we are positioned in a relatively unique point because when I when I'm, you know, when I'm not on a sabbatical at CASBS, I'm I'm I'm leading in Israel to two different like entities, I would say. One entity is my research lab. And in the case of collective action, so our research lab is doing work on, you know, questions pertaining to collective action.
You know, what can motivate people to action? What would make collective action effective and other questions? But we're doing studies like like many others are doing studies. And I know, you know, like like your lab is doing studies. The other arm or the other entity, and I know that your work is also, you know, very much implemented in the real world. But but in Israel, what we did was creating an NGO, an NGO called Accord Social Psychology for Social Change.
And this NGO is basically implementing our scientific world work in the real world. And what happened now in Israel is I think that it's a fascinating situation for scientists, for for people like us, because immediately when the protest in Israel started, we offered our you can call it services like research and science to the headquarters of the protest. So to give a little bit of a background, five months ago there were elections in Israel.
And a very right wing, I would even say radical right wing government won the election for the first time in many years. I mean, the right wing lead or win the elections in Israel for many years. That's the first time in which they didn't need anyone from the center or the left sides of the political map to join them.
And they could and did form a government which is a can call it like a clear, pure right wing government, the most right extremist government that has been formed in Israel, I would say ever. And immediately after this government was appointed, they introduced what they call a judicial reform in the Israeli regime. And what we call, like I would say, the democratic camp in Israel would call a judicial revolution.
So they're basically trying to restructure the relationship between the different parts of the Israeli or political regime, giving much, much, much more power to the government, and much less power to the entities that are supposed to defend the rights of minorities, promote equality, etc. like the Supreme Court or the Israeli Parliament. And for many, many, many Israelis, this was a sign of the end or potential end of the democratic regime in Israel.
I would say, you know, I think that we talked about it in one of our lunch meetings here. You know, we've we've experienced many challenges in Israel in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other situations. I've never in my life experienced a situation in which I, you know, thought to myself that it's realistically possible that in one or two years from now, Israel, as I know it, or as we have known it as a democratic country, will simply not exist.
So I'm not talking about the fact that it won't exist physically, but it won't exist as a democratic country. And this has led to, you know, this is really, I mean, it's really concerning and worrying. And, you know, I would say, you know, it prevented me from sleeping at night.
And I really and I think that that's true for many, many Israelis. And that's the, you know, that's the negative side of what happened. But the positive side is that immediately, immediately when the government introduced this potential reform, hundreds of thousands of Israelis went out to the streets and say and said, that's not going to happen, not not in our shift.
And, you know, one of the best slogans that I've seen was that they said, you know, you messed up with the wrong generation. You don't even try to do these kind of things when it's in our in our shift, it's not going to happen. And I think that, you know, when you look at it in a comparative perspective, comparing Israel, unfortunately, to, you know, countries like Hungary or Poland.
So the good news is that the Israeli public, you know, was much, much, much more like, I would say, energetic and much, much more worried about what happened and realized very soon in the process that if we will not do something really dramatic and real fast, then maybe we're losing our country. And since then, in the last 21 weeks, every week, at least 200, between 200 to 300,000 people are going out to the streets either once a week or twice a week. And this is accompanied also by many other actions that maybe we'll talk about them very, very soon.
Just to give you a sense, 300,000 Israelis in terms of the proportion when taking into account the Israeli population is like, is equivalent to 15 to 20 million Americans. So think about 15 to 20 million Americans going out to the streets once or twice a week. I'm talking about thousands and thousands of people who stopped working, quit their jobs and are working like 24-7 in the protest.
And these are not like, you know, usually we talk about these professional activists. These are not the professional activists. These are, you know, ordinary people.
You know, my mother is 73 years old. She told me two weeks ago that she walked six miles around the Israeli parliament as part of the protest. I told her, you know, mommy, you didn't walk six miles in the last ten years together.
And so this is, you know, the kind of people who are involved in the protest. And it's amazing and it's exciting. And it's been very successful, at least successful in the sense that three weeks ago or three or four weeks ago, the Israeli government declared that they're posing that they're posing this reform.
So they're posing the reform. There's a negotiation right now. It looks as if it's not going to, you know, be implemented.
But still, every week, hundreds of thousands of people are going out to the streets. And we can talk, if you want, about our part in this process or what we did as a research team as part of this process. But that's the background.
Rob Willer: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's helpful. In part because I'm woefully ignorant of the Israeli-Palestinian context, besides just being, you know, a news reader in the US.
But if you don't mind, why don't you tell us a little bit about the research that you've been doing with Accord? It's Accord, yeah, your organization, and how it's plugged into the larger collective action that's been happening in Israel. I think we'd be fascinated to hear more about it.
Eran Halperin: So for us, I would say, you know, it's been an amazing opportunity. And immediately when it happened or when we realized that that's what's going to happen, we created a team of researchers and political consultants. We raised funding, part of it in Israel, part of it in the US.
And we approached, like we didn't wait for anyone to approach us. We approached the headquarters of the protest and offered them help. And it's interesting because there's an interesting structure for the protest in Israel right now that I think that really helped us in making an impact.
Because what's happening in Israel is like, there's a mess. Like there are 2007, sorry, 207 NGOs that are involved in the protest. That's the number.
So you have out of these 207, you know, you have academics against the reform and social workers against the reform and people in Tel Aviv against the reform and people in Jerusalem against the reform, 207 organizations. And these organizations are very, very different in terms of their personnel, in terms of their structure and in terms of their ideology. So all of them are against the reform, but some of them are also against the occupation, whereas others are preoccupation.
Some of them would be only, were created only in order to protest against the reform, whereas others are organizations that are working pro-democratic values for many, many years. So they're very, very, very different. But beyond or bringing together all these 207 organizations, there's a centralized headquarters, and these headquarters are organized.
They're the ones who are bringing the funding. They are the ones who are creating the big demonstrations. And then they are the ones who are creating, I would call it, like the main narrative of the demonstrations or of the protest, which made it much, much easier for us to work or to use our research vis-a-vis these headquarters.
Because it's easier. It would have been much, much harder to work with 207 organizations. It's much easier when you have these headquarters and we approach them.
Israel is a very small place. It takes you three WhatsApp messages to get to the CEO of the headquarter, really, and to tell him, you know, his name is Eran. It's easier. Both of us are Eran. Eran, I want to work for you. We don't need money. We want to do the research for you. We want to help you to become more effective. It took us 24 hours to get there and to get the seat around the table, and that's all we needed.
And since then, what we've been doing, we're running studies on a daily basis, on a daily basis. So we've run since then more than 25 studies. Part of them are longitudinal studies in which we simply try to track changes in public opinion, in attitudes and emotions, in support for the protest, what do people find useful, what do people find less useful.
Other parts of our studies, our studies are more experimental studies, like very, very large scale experimental studies, in which we try to test the effectiveness of different actions. And what we're basically trying to do is to make some contribution, I would say, to creating an effective strategy for the protest.
Rob Willer: And in those experiments, how would you measure effectiveness or what would be measures that would relate to effectiveness?
Eran Halperin: So I would say that we have three main challenges that are translated into three different outcome measures in terms of effectiveness. And this is in a way, you'll see very clearly that it speaks nicely to the kind of work that we've been doing before, you've been doing before us and then we've done, and then in this protest, but that's also what they asked us. So when we asked the people in the headquarters of the protest, what are your challenges?
What are your challenges? What are we trying to achieve? They asked three main questions.
One question was, how do we motivate more and more people to engage in the protest? How do we bring people, motivate them to leave their homes and get out to the streets? How do we create a norm that would say participating in the protest is what people do?
That's what people do. I mean, and if you don't do it, if on Saturday night you're not in the protest, you have to find a good excuse for that. So one thing is, how do we motivate people to action?
Second question is, how do we create support for the protest and the protestors even among people who are not on the streets? And the third question, which was the most important question for the protest, and they defined it as the number one challenge is, how do we change the attitudes of people who support the government to make them or to convince them, to convince their leaders to change the policy? So effectiveness in this sense would not be, you know, bringing more people to the streets, and it won't be like making them support the protest.
It would be making them tell their politicians, stop the reform or post the reform, because of many, even if I don't, I'm not very sympathetic to the goals or the values of the protest. You need to stop the reform. And that was the main challenge they posed.
And I can tell you because I think that this is also where, at least the way I see it, our research was translated almost one by one to concrete actions of the protest.
Rob Willer: So this last way of conceptualizing success or a desirable outcome that you want to affect with protest tactics, maybe you could speak to some kind of example of where you studied that and also felt like that research wound up being implemented or valuable to the protest, to the collective action.
Eran Halperin: So I'll give one example that I think that speaks nicely to our research, but would also maybe stimulate a conversation between us about effectiveness of different means and different tactics. So it's interesting. I'll go back a little bit.
And in 2021 and 2022, Eric Schuman did or published two papers that basically asked this question. I mean, what makes a protest effective? And in his case, he defined effectiveness as what would change the minds of the people who oppose the protest in a way that would make them, you know, or would lead them to put some pressure on their politicians or put some pressure on the people who lead their parties in line with the demands of a protest.
That was the main question. So the question wasn't about how do you motivate people for action, and it wasn't also about how do you create support for the protest. It was about how do you make a protest effective in terms of changing actual policies.
And what Eric suggested is that protest become or protest are most effective when they create a sense of what he called constructive disruption. Constructive disruption, it's like a very delicate, I would say, balance between two very, very different things. So a protest should convey two different messages.
One message is a message of constructiveness. Constructiveness means we're here to protest not because we want to destroy the society, not because we want to create a revolution, but because we care. We want to be constructive.
We care. We want to improve the situation, but that's a constructive message. But this constructive message is balanced or should be balanced if we want to be effective, according to our definition, with some disruptive actions.
And disruptive actions or disruptive messages are messages that are basically saying, we're being constructive, but if you will not address our demands or our goals, you won't be able to manage the society here. I mean, we will make your life so miserable and your daily routines would be disrupted so much that at some point you would say, even if I disagree with you, I'm going to give up and I'm going to do what you've asked for. And we can delve more deeply into this idea of constructive disruption.
But when we approached the protest in Israel right from the start, we said, you have to be, we will have to find a way to convey this message of constructive disruption. And we did two things, or we tried to convince them to do two things, which were at the beginning were, I would say, quite revolutionary, at least in the Israeli context. The first thing was to say, what's the best sign for constructiveness, I would say.
And we identified the Israeli flag as this optimal sign. Israeli flag, and I think that in the US it's also the same thing for many, many years. In Israel, the flag was affiliated with the right wing.
For many years, the flag is like the Zionism, the ultimate patriotism. That's the right wing flag. And we said, if we want to prove, quote, unquote, that we're here because we care about Israel, not because we want to destroy Israel, but because we care about Israeli democracy, let's reclaim the Israeli flag.
So what the protest, the headquarters of the protest did on the first week of the protest was to purchase thousands and thousands of huge flags and to give them free of charge to all the protesters. So anyone who arrived to the protest got a flag. So when you looked at the Israeli protest, the pro-democracy protest, you saw thousands and thousands of flags.
No one in Israel from the non-democratic right-wing camp could have said then, you're a non-Zionist or you're against the country, because it was very clear that the protest reclaimed the Israeli flag. That was a revolution. At the same time, we offered the protest to initiate the most disruptive action that could be imagined.
Things that were never, never done in the history of Israel. I'll give you three examples. They closed the roads on the way to Israel.
There's one international airport in Israel. The protest closed it. And they closed it when the Israeli Prime Minister was supposed to fly to meetings outside of Israel.
Basically saying, if you will not give us what we want, Israelis would not be able to go in and out of Israel. It's simply not going to happen. They convinced officers and soldiers in special units in the Israeli Army to put out declarations saying that if this reform will pass, they will not show up for training in the Israeli Army.
And I'm not talking about dozens of people. I'm talking about thousands of people. When it comes to a society in conflict, like the Israeli society, that's the optimal disruption.
It led to the situation in which the Israeli Minister of Defense approached Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and said, you must pose the legislation because otherwise I cannot guarantee that we can defend Israel. Like there is no, I mean, the Israeli army will tear apart if you do it. And the third thing is that they approached Israeli famous startup companies and leaders of these startup companies and convinced them to say, or to say that if Israel will not be a democracy, or if this legislation will pass and would lead Israel towards a non-democratic process, then they will take their money outside of Israel.
And they already started doing it. The more extreme representatives of the startup society in Israel already moved their money outside of Israel, and Israel already started getting some very negative indications from different international financial companies saying their warnings about Israel. So these three things, blocking roads, but meaningful roads like the airport, like threatening the stability of the Israeli army and threatening the stability of the Israeli economy, when they were balanced with the constructiveness of reclaiming the Israeli flag, were a clear translation of what we called before constructive disruption.
So on the one hand, the Israeli government said, we have to do something. Israel will not be able to manage if we want to address their goals. On the other hand, they couldn't say, let's delegitimize these traitors or these protesters, because it was very clear that the protesters are, they are the good part of the Israeli society.
And they will say, and you'll be happy when I say that, you know, at the same time, it was very clear that we should make any possible effort to make sure that the protest will not become violent.
Because because we realized, you know, from your work, from other people's work, that nonviolent protest would probably gain more public support. But on the other hand, we said, let's be as disruptive as we can without being violent.
Rob Willer: Yeah, it's that category of nonviolent but highly disruptive protest that I have found the most challenging to generalize about. It's very hard to generalize. People will ask me, so is there a clear signal here shutting down highways: Bad idea? And I would say, no, it's not actually that clear. I would say that I've seen more evidence in the US context that that would backfire as a strategy with respect to popular support as a very specific outcome than that it would be effective, again, popular support being the easiest thing to measure, most commonly measured, but that it's very hard to generalize.
What kind of street are we talking about? What kind of community are we in? Very, very hard to generalize around the highly disruptive tactics, just in my own experience in the US context.
Eran Halperin: So, as you know, we've also done studies in the US and in Israel. And I would say, first of all, that I agree with you, that it's hard to be very accurate about what kind of tactics would cross the line that would make them less favorable. But I will add two things to that.
For me, the mechanism is very clear. It's not clear what kind of tactics would actually lead, accurately lead to this mechanism. So for me, what's very clear is that if effectiveness means change, change in terms of policy, then constructive disruption is the, at least according to our studies, is the optimal tool.
Now, I can see situations in which even, you know, the same tactic in one place would lead to constructive disruption and in the other place would not be considered as constructive at all. And this makes it very complicated. But I think that also there is a delicate and interesting tension here between what you call, for example, in your JPSP great paper, it was 2020, right?
Rob Willer: I think that's right.
2020 paper. So the outcome measure is social support, is support of the protest. And I think that here there is something really interesting because I can see a situation in which the protest is using tactics that would lead to a decrease in support of the protest and at the same time an increase in support of addressing the protest's demands.
For example, what happened now in Israel is that the most radical move was what the soldiers and officers in the army did. Because they basically violated the very fundamental contract of the Israeli society. Because the contract has been that no matter which government is ruling right now, the military should do what the government wants the military to do.
And if the government is saying, go out to war, you go out to war. And if the government is saying, you know, we're disengaging from Gaza and evacuating Israeli settlements, that's what the military should do. And people should not refuse to go to the army if the government is implementing right-wing or left-wing policy.
And what happened here was breaking the rules. Because people, you know, said, yeah, we will serve the army, but we want to serve only the army of the democratic-like regime. And if it's a non-democratic regime, we're not going to be here anymore.
And this act, and we saw it in the data, decreased support for the protest. So many people that are on the center of the Israeli society, I would say, or the Israeli political map, said if supporting the protest means support, like for people saying we're not going to show up for training, we're not part of it. And at the same time, the same people said, but if this is what the protest, I mean, if that's what the protest does, we need to pause the reform.
And that's, I think that's part of the difference, or, you know, when you look at the mismatch between your finding and our finding, I think that's part of it.
Rob Willer: Yeah, so I'm totally comfortable with this pattern of data. So just to summarize the research we've done, at least this paper that we're talking about now.
Eran Halperin: Which was led by Matthew Feinberg, right?
Rob Willer: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Matthew Feinberg, my former student, spearheaded this line of work. And what we find across a bunch of experiments is that when you present people with the exact same news report of a protest action, and you manipulate how extreme the tactics are, where extreme is defined as using behaviors that are harmful to others or highly disruptive to social order, or violent, I would include violence as well, that we mostly were studying sub-violent extreme protest actions in this research, that people support the protest less when they're seeing that version of the protest.
They perceive the protesters as less moral. They identify with them less. They support the movement less, and then they often will support the cause, the policies less.
Now, the way we construct our argument is we say, there's a lot of stuff that you might be trying to do tactically as a social movement. There's a bunch of different strategies. Sometimes you're, like I was saying before, sometimes you're a union, you're trying to withdraw your labor from a workplace in order to wield some power.
Sometimes you're at a very early stage of mobilization. You're just trying to get on the map. You're trying to agenda seed, as they say.
Maybe that's the stage with animal rights protesters now. You're trying to get headlines. You're trying to get on people's radar.
Other times you're trying to persuade, perhaps. Other times you're trying to affect an election, a ballot initiative, a primary, what have you. And then a lot of the time you're trying to apply direct pressure to institutions, organizations, elites, make it not worth it to them to pursue a certain course of action.
And instead pressure them to switch or perhaps the general public or some segment of the general public. Other times you have a mix of strategies. And still other times you're not thinking very strategically as well.
I mean, it would even put in terms of the goals. Sometimes observers might think a set of protesters are not being strategic, that they're being just expressive. And it's actually that their goals are sort of invisible to the observers.
So often when marginalized group members get together for some sort of collective action that might look unpersuasive and purely expressive or performative to an outside observer, what they might be missing is that it's an empowerment act, that it's a group of folks that are getting together to sort of delete, as we would say in our kind of pointy headed academic spaces, like delete these hegemonic ideas that come from the majority group members that might get into your head. Let's remove those and instead empower ourselves and get together and say, we're not going to think that way about us. We're going to think in a more empowering way about ourselves.
And that was a lot of the gay rights mobilization of the 90s was about that. That's a lot of the Black is Beautiful movement in the 1960s and 70s. In those cases, if an observer was to show up and say, I am unpersuaded by this action, the protesters would be like, that's great.
That's terrific evidence that I have done a good job of getting you out of my head, because I'm trying to overcome that dual consciousness that your majority group put in my brain and socialize me to have. I'm here to do the opposite of that. It would be great actually to have good evidence that you didn't like this.
I think there's a lot of stuff people try to do in movements. I have no problem at all with the idea that you might have a protest strategy that's primarily about applying direct pressure to a population or institutions or elites. What I would say is that usually you would also like to lose as little public support as possible while pursuing that strategy.
So you might, for example, strategically use symbols that resonate with the far right, the group that you expect will be pissed off about the tactic potentially, try to keep as many of them on board, respecting the protesters, potentially joining it as possible. So that's the kind of strategy that to my mind would make a lot of sense. You're pursuing an institutional pressure strategy, and then you're using, you know, rhetoric, symbols, you know, what have you, in order to minimize a loss of public support, or so that you can still get the public support gains that you're investing in with other strategies that you're doing.
So in any event, in the US context, I think an interesting question is, so having established, I really don't have any gripe with the way you're thinking about it. I think that when we did this project, a lot of people read us as saying it's all about popularity, you know, that activist groups should just be trying to get popular. And we just don't think about it that way.
In fact, the title of the paper is the activist dilemma, because we're sympathetic that the exact tactical constraints, if you're trying to maximize popularity, put you in a tough place for trying to do other stuff, like, you know, like I was saying, like, raise consciousness around your issue, get news coverage, apply pressure to institutions, you know, you're not going to really probably be able to maximize on these things at once. And so you want to, but you want to know about the tradeoffs, and you'd like to know how can we minimize, say, you know, again, say you're doing the direct pressure strategy, you want to minimize, you know, the tradeoffs in other respects. And actually, a lot of what you are talking about fits really well with our framework, because we, in our analysis, the first thing that happens when you engage in violence or some sort of sub violent, harmful, highly disruptive acts, like property destruction, vandalism, and so on.
The first thing is that you're perceived as less moral. Well, what can you do about that? Is there, you know, is there stuff that you can do to make sure that the average observer sees you as moral?
And I think you all invested in a lot of that kind of strategy. One of the things that I think about as like the big exception in the US, like I would say the US is like really pretty uptight about protest tactics from a cross-cultural perspective. So I also think that the US is maybe a bit exceptional in this respect.
Like they really like their protests, nonviolent and ideally not too disruptive. I think there's like this very specific cultural thing going on here that's a bit a legacy of the civil rights movement, which has been championed and lionized as like the kind of prototypical social movement. And it ends up having a lot of influence over what people expect from activists.
But if we had said that it's only about being popular, you know, it would be sort of a ridiculous argument. I mean, we're in a country that has pictures of leaders of a violent revolution on its currency. It like carves them into the sides of mountains, you know, like it would be ridiculous for us to say under no conditions.
Can you get away with subviolent, highly disruptive protest tactics? Because we live in a country birthed of a popularly supported bloody revolution. And a lot of countries are like that.
So there's clearly exceptions. But I think that our model actually can be somewhat helpful for directing us to understand when those exceptions happen. So, for example, when is the taking up of arms seen as justified?
Well, when the force you're taking them up against is seen as already very immoral, it's seen that you have no other choice, and thus the use of violence or subviolent disruption, you're not seen as having any choice, and so it is seen as a moral act. But having it be the last resort is probably critical to maintaining popular support for those kinds of actions in the US context and probably a lot of others. But I want to maybe suggest something that I'd be interested in your reaction to, which is that while I think that the way I think about things, the way you think about things might actually be pretty simpatico, what do you think about the possibility that the US is a bit unusual in having a real investment in nonviolent, non-extreme protest and that we might be sort of uptight in the US in terms of the bandwidth protesters are given before they lose support and that there might even be the specific legacy of the civil rights movement?
This is a thought that I've had that I've read in the social movements literature that civil rights movement is super influential over what Americans think is an acceptable way to protest and be an activist because it was so successful and moral and historically significant. It's really championed and honestly, most on the right in public opinion polling would say the civil rights movement was a good thing for America. And so it has this huge influence and maybe the US is a bit exceptional in its obsession with non-violent, non-extreme protest in a way where our research might not traffic cleanly to other contexts like Israel, Palestine.
The popularity trade-offs that one might face for highly disruptive tactics or violent tactics might be less in these contexts. What do you think?
Eran Halperin: First of all, I think that we should collaborate on a study that compares the effectiveness of tactics across different countries.
Rob Willer: Yes.
Eran Halperin: No. Seriously.
Rob Willer: Well, that's the scientific response.
That's the scientific response.
**Rob Willer:**I appreciate it.
Eran Halperin: Now, I'll say, I don't think that the US is… I mean, my guess here, and that's a speculation, is that the US is not unique. Because I think that I would guess that anywhere around the world, even in the crazy Israeli society, but also in normal countries, no, seriously, people, when you ask them, would say that only the normative, peaceful protest is like favorable or acceptable. That's what they'll say.
And in all of these cases, if you ask people, to what extent do they support or in favor or feel warm feelings towards the protest, so peaceful normative, like protest would always, always be superior over any other option. The only caveat I'm adding here, and now let's have some debate, Robb.
Rob Willer: Yeah, yeah, let's do it.
Eran Halperin: Is that it's simply not effective, according to the way I see it. So here is where I draw the line. And I'm taking you back to what I said an hour ago or something like long time ago.
My, again, at least my experience and also my data, in many cases, show that people don't give up their power out of goodwill. They're just not doing it. And it's true for, you know, gender hierarchy and ethnic hierarchy and Israeli-Palestinian conflict and immigrants in Europe and whatever you want.
People don't give up their power out of goodwill. So the fact that they would see thousands of people on the streets marching and singing songs and raising flags and doing whatever would not lead to any change. They would say that it's really nice and it would support the protest or the cause.
But at the end of the day, if they will be asked about would you, I mean, have to allocate budgets or if you have to reconsider the way, they would simply not do it. They will not do it because you need to put some pressure, some pressure on high power group people or individuals or politicians in order for them to actually create change. And this is where I draw the line between what makes a protest favorable.
I mean, people would look at it as a good thing, nice thing, support it, would empathize with it, whatever, versus what would create a situation in which people would say, I'm willing to change the policy, I'm willing to give up power, I'm willing to redistribute my resources because of this protest. And these are two very, very different things. Now, I think that what we offer is that, and this is again based mainly on Eric Schuman's work, is that the line is, so a protest would be effective in this way, mainly when it will be non-normative, but also non-violent.
Because this is exactly the trade-off that you talked about before. When a protest becomes violent, people are saying, we cannot make compromises or give up to violence. That doesn't make sense.
And we do not negotiate with violent people, and we can respond violently when the protest uses violence. So violence is, for me, it's like in most cases, we have one small result that shows differently. But in most cases, violence is not effective.
That's what we get in, I would say, 90% of our studies, of our empirical studies, both in the US and in Israel. But protests are also not effective, effective in terms of creating change in policy support when they are normative. So they are effective only in this very unique configuration of being, on the one hand, non-normative, non-normative meaning disruptive, but not crossing the line and being violent.
And we find it in the US, we found it in Israel, we found it in other places, by the way. In Israel and also in the US, we found it in regards to many different issues. So we had protests of people with disabilities and Ethiopians and BLM protests here.
And in all of these cases, again, with one exception, you know, this exception of the, how did you call it? The three-way interaction in which we found that violent, some violent was effective. In most cases, what we find is that effectiveness, in terms of like support for changing policy, is driven by, mainly by nonviolent, but also non-normative kind of actions.
Rob Willer: So, I mean, I have almost, in some ways, I agree with your position maybe even more than you do. Like, I actually think that violence is sometimes effective. You know, like I think there are examples of that.
Eran Halperin: In some cases. I agree.
Rob Willer: Yeah, like if you look at Erika Chenoweth's work, you know, they find definitely that nonviolent social movements are more effective as they, you know, in their effort to tabulate these things. But that it's a difference of degree and that violent movements can be effective. No, that doesn't mean that violence help.
But then you can even find examples of at least a violent collective action helping. And then, you know, you want to talk about directly pressuring institutions to change. Like we have examples of violent revolutions and examples where anything less would have not succeeded, you know, like the powers that we were not going to give up the power, you know, a lot of colonial opposition was like that.
There was no other way, you know. So I think that the model that's in my head of collective action effectiveness is even that complex, that, you know, that that finding that violence is ineffective, violence is, even that is conditionalized, you know. But I would say that, and I'm curious how you're measuring effectiveness in the context of a survey experiment, because I don't really trust that in my survey experiments I can study that very confidently.
Like, I feel like I can study popular support with some level of confidence, pretty high even. And I feel like our methods are good for that. But a global assessment of effectiveness is, I think, really tough with our methods.
And I know you're thinking about it more complexly than just the results of survey experiments. But just as a couple of examples in the US context, I think it is really hard to generalize about whether, you know, a given strategy is the one that's going to be effective. So, like, in the US context, we have examples where really disruptive protest tactics were more effective.
I mean, what's more disruptive than shutting a factory down because none of the workers are willing to come to work? You know, it completely paralyzes the factory. It's not a mellow strategy, you know.
It's not chill. It's not trying to get the people who run the factory to really, really love the workers. That's not the idea.
Now, I've advised unions on protest strategy and I've advised them to invest in strategies that would maximize popular support, even as they're making something like a public school unable to function. And I think really smart unions do diversify their tactics. You know, it's like the nurses union in California will advocate for a bunch of compensation improvements, but they'll also advocate for a better patient-to-nurse ratio, and that's something that benefits everybody.
So you have those kinds of tactics where clearly investing in some sort of disruption makes sense. But then you also have other movements where I feel like public opinion wound up being a really big deal and the persuasion project was a big part of it. I think that the civil rights movement got the success as it did for a great number of reasons and some of them direct pressuring of institutions, but a lot of the other successes owed to persuasion.
So much of the strategy in the civil rights movement starting in the 60s or even the late 50s into the 60s involved influencing judges' decision making. I mean, some of the biggest successes were around getting judges to decide in certain ways. And I think research is quite clear that judges respond to their sense of public opinion in their decision making.
Getting northerners to come south and help register people to vote. Getting northern whites, politicians and the general public to take sides against racist white conservatives that ran state governments in the south. Getting congresspeople to vote for civil rights, they needed an assurance that they at least weren't going to lose too many votes from doing so, from voting for the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.
And there was also in the civil rights movement a cultural project that was happening too, that was very much embedded in the minds of the mass public. And that involved trying to get black people full or fuller personhood in American's minds. And that's a project that has taken decades to unfold, that's not done, but it ends up affecting tons and tons of stuff.
The outrage that people feel about police brutality, the rates of interracial marriage and interracial friendship, the way minorities are treated in neighborhoods and organizations, voting for minority politicians in elections, public opinion on the new race-related issues that end up entering the public sphere that they haven't applied direct pressure on yet, but you can bring that public opinion, it gets attached to the new issues as they emerge.
Tons of stuff, support for civil rights struggles in other countries, like the US is a powerful actor, if they take a position, even a small one, to pressure against apartheid, it can be a really important thing. Where does that come from? It comes from a belief in black people's personhood.
So investing in that persuasion project was a big part of civil rights and was also a big part of gay rights as well, which had a kind of a symmetrical, it had some symmetries. It wasn't the whole story at all, but especially in a democracy, in a world where democracy is probably the most prevalent form of government, a lot of social change goals are reached through the minds of the mass public. Even if you're trying to just pressure elites, they're thinking about what loses them votes.
They're thinking about what is going to keep them from getting kicked out of a restaurant or a country club or whatever, if it's a judge or an economic elite, what's going to lead their kid to get mocked at boarding school. Even if it's a not obvious effect of a public opinion, there's a bunch of ways that I think it matters. So I wouldn't write it off either.
Not that you are, but there are movement examples in the US where you could argue that was the central goal and that it was right for it to be.
Eran Halperin: Yeah, but maybe the... 100% in agreement with everything that you said, but I think that the main conclusion, at least for me, the thing that I'm taking from what you said and what I said before is that we need to be much, much more accurate in defining the goals or what effectiveness means for each and every movement in each and every stage vis-à-vis each and every audience. And I think that oftentimes we simply mix different things and then use inaccurate means to achieve goals that are not well defined.
So if we're talking about creating motivation or empowerment, which is a different thing, among minority groups or low power groups that are part of the protest, this is one goal. And if that's the main thing, some tactics or some actions may be the most relevant ones. If you want to create public support or persuasion or different, that's another thing.
And if you want to put pressure on decision makers, it's a third thing. Or if you want to create pressure on decision makers through their voters, that's another thing.
Even when you said that the title of the paper is The Protester Dilemma, but still, if I remember correctly and maybe correct me if I'm wrong, still you had one main dv in the paper, which was support for the protest.
Rob Willer: Yeah, that's true.
Eran Halperin: And I can say the same on our papers, whereas I think that the more comprehensive look at these questions should be, there's a protest, who's the target audience, what's the goal when it comes to this target audience, and then what are the best tactics to achieve this goal. Now, you said before, and I agree, sometimes you have multiple goals, and it's not just one thing. You want to achieve different things, but you have to prioritize.
Rob Willer: So how do you study that in a survey? I mean, because if we felt that we could measure just overall success of tactic, you know, in our survey experiments, we would have absolutely included that dependent variable, because it's obviously the thing that matters most. But how do you do that?
Eran Halperin: Well, you know, of course, it's an oversimplification, because I'm going to do it in like 10 seconds. But you can ask in the same survey, you know, like, I'm just thinking out, in your strengthening democracy challenge, you had multiple DVs. And you showed that some interventions are more effective for some DVs and some are less effective.
And I think that you can do the same thing here. You can say, you know, let's take three DVs. One is people's willingness to engage themselves in the action.
One, second is people's support and affiliation with the action. Second thing, totally different question, right? And the third thing, people's willingness to support a change in policy or willingness to do something to promote this changing policy.
These are three very different outcome measures. And if we can show that, you know, some tactics are more effective among some audiences in, you know, promoting one of these outcomes, but not the other outcome. I think that we can say something. I mean, the richness of our understanding of these processes would be much higher.
Rob Willer: So, totally agree. Those are three important things that are conceptually…
Eran Halperin: Maybe there are more. I don’t know.
Rob Willer: I think there are, yeah. But I totally agree. Those are three really, really important outcomes that you can study in a self-report survey context and shit. But just for the record, we do measure all three of those in the activist dilemma.
And we generally find those are positively correlated in the context of our studies.
Eran Halperin: By the way, I will say... Let me be an Israeli one time in this conversation and politely interrupt. I will say that I assume that the correlation between these three things is at least generally positive.
But the more interesting thing is to isolate these small groups of people who would say, I don't support the protest, but we should change the policy. Or I think that we should not change the policy. Even if these are small groups of people, they are the most interesting ones.
Rob Willer: Yeah, I agree. Those folks are super interesting. Yeah. So we do measure interest in joining up with these protesters, support for the movement, and support for the causes and policies they advocate for. So we do study those things. And we do find the same results are robust across all of them.
I will say that the policy one, we get the least consistent decrease, the least consistent negative effects of extreme protest tactics. But I think that has as much to do with the fact that people have a bunch of reasons for having the policy positions they do that aren't necessarily affected by exposure to a single protest of the sort that we were studying. You know, like people have partisanship, you know, they have ideology, you know.
So there's a bunch of reasons why I think they're a little more rigid on that than they are on what do you think about this group you just saw do a thing you may or may not like. And while we do, you know, I agree that it is interesting to find these folks in these cases where you might be getting divergent effects and that when you get divergent effects, that you would prefer to be increasing people's policy support than their support for the movement. I agree.
Because I mean, usually your movement cares most... Well, okay, actually, yeah, I see you.
Eran Halperin: Oh, it's a question.
Rob Willer: Yeah, it's a question. I would, as an activist, usually be willing to do that trade-off, you know, of like I would prefer that you like, not like me necessarily that much, but like my policies because I'm not here to make friends or whatever in Survivor Talk. I'm here to, you know, like pass some, you know, some kind of legislation or something like that.
So I agree with all that. We didn't find that that was a particularly common thing in the experiments. We didn't find any evidence for that in the experiments we did, but I certainly agree that must happen in the world.
Eran Halperin: For me, the classic example is, you know, I can give you two examples from the Israeli context in which the high power group simply doesn't care. You know, I mean, I remember there is a small group in Israel of Jews from Ethiopian origin. They're the only black community in Israel.
It's a small group that is very, very highly discriminated against. And they're considered like very nice and polite people. And for many, many years, there was a clear discrimination against them, and no one really cared.
And they went out to protest for many years against racism and discrimination. And no one did anything. And no one did anything because everyone knew that, you know, they're so nice.
And they're not going to affect the, you know, they're not in terms of their number. They're not enough. The numbers are not high enough so they can, you know, affect the, you know, elections or something like that.
They can, you know, stand out on the streets with their nice like flags and signs for years. And no one would care. And then at some point they came to us and they said, should we do more like violent things?
Should we? And we asked them, what do you want to achieve? And everyone told them, you know, people would like us less if we, you know, put cars on fire or I don't know what.
But when they did that, and they did that at some point, suddenly the government said we have to create a committee that will examine the, you know, the discrimination. Because what do you do when the high power groups simply don't care? You know, the bigger example that they have here, you know, in our case, in the Israeli case, in the last almost two decades, Israelis don't care about the occupation.
They don't care. You know, Palestinians are there. There's conflict
Most Israelis, they don't care in the level that, you know, it's not an issue. No one talks about it. No one talks about it.
And there are these anti-occupation movements. You know, they're demonstrating for so many years very nicely, very politely. And then, you know, we, you know, I ask myself, we ask ourselves, do they have to be violent in order for us to care?
I mean, do the Palestinians or people who support the Palestinians have to do something so dramatic? Because, you know, it's when I'm, you know, putting aside my scientist like hat and looking at it as just a citizen, I'm saying that's a terrible conclusion, right? I mean, you don't want to believe that only violent would make people care.
Rob Willer: It definitely gets headlines, it gets attention, you know. So, Eran, I mean, one thing that you and I really have in common is an interest in applied behavioral science. And so I'm just interested to hear sort of in a nutshell, what's your philosophy of the role of behavioral science in, you know, application and specifically application of social movements?
Eran Halperin: Yeah. So, you know, I mean, that's very large part of, I would say, even from my identity as a scientist. Yeah. I think that, you know, I see our role and I'm, you know, to be very honest, I've been criticized on this approach many times, almost every time I present my work.
But I don't, I mean, I think that a very large part of social scientists' role is to deal with the biggest challenges of societies. And in this sense, I think that we, I would even say, we don't have the privilege of approaching these challenges from a, I would call it, from a descriptive perspective. You know, for me, the parallel of it would be, you know, some, you know, someone who study, you know, biology or chemistry that would say, you know, you know, I'm thinking about the biggest challenge, I don't know, cancer or anything like that.
And I say, no, but I study, I studied it from, I studied from a from a neutral perspective, you know, for and against, you know, disease and no, we simply cannot do it. I think that we should think of ourselves as in the very same way as people who have to deal with the challenges of the societies and to find, you know, medications for the challenges of societies. And in this sense, it means on the one hand, to use a very and I think that both of us are anyway there, you know, very interventionist approach in our studies or in our science.
But then also to be much, much proactive in terms of asking ourselves, how can these findings be implemented? And I think that, at least from my experience, this idea, I can even say that the naive idea that, you know, we will create the knowledge, we'll write our amazing papers, publish them in the best journals. And then people on the field that really want to create change will read our papers, use our insights and implement them.
Simply doesn't work. It doesn't work because, you know, because we write our papers, most of us, maybe you write it better. But I mean, most of us write our papers in a way that's not accessible enough.
We don't have them in our mind when we do that. And it's I think that it makes sense because we do research and they don't have not the time, not the energy. And many of them don't have the skills, you know, to translate this knowledge.
And then the question is, I mean, whose role is it to do this translation in a way that would actually make our, you know, studies or science worse something to the society? I think that it's our role. I think that it's our role.
I don't think that anyone else can take our ideas or can take our scientific findings and implement them. I don't think that we should be, you know, at the end of this chain. So I don't think that we should be the implementers, but I think that we should be very, very close to the implementers.
So, you know, if I take this metaphor and use it, you know, we talked about the protest in Israel. I don't want to be the headquarters of the protest myself, but I want to be there in the room. I want to design their tools.
I want to do the research. I want to train the people and to make sure that what they do is actually relying on evidence and research and theory.
Rob Willer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I see it really similarly to you. And I've also done a lot of work in applied settings and been fortunate to have access to political campaigns for, you know, causes and candidates that I support and unions, social movement organizations, public health organizations and so on. And it's interesting because, like, a lot of people, I think, have this perspective of our behavioral science is not strong enough to be applied in these settings, which is a reasonable thing to worry about for sure.
We should definitely worry about that. But what I've found is the access points to apply applying behavioral science for me have been like becoming, you know, somehow plugged in to decision maker with decision makers because they're either interested or otherwise found some way to insinuate myself with them. And my my experience is that they're talking about behavioral science, you know, like they're theorizing about human behavior and perceptions and beliefs and voting and movements.
Support and, you know, concessions and what leads people to defer. And, you know, they're thinking about all this stuff. They just don't have systematic data on it, you know.
And so there is a role for the kinds of data that we collect and it can improve things relative to the more impoverished data that folks have to work with because they're busy being specialists on something else. You know, like they know a bunch of stuff we don't know anything about. And they're really good decision makers, where I, anyway, am a terrible decision maker.
And so there is a role, especially if you can distill it, make it clear, identify what matters about it for people. There is a role. I mean, if I could complain, I would complain about like the amount of high level decision making in American politics and government that's based on focus groups, like an essentially unpublishable methodology in the social sciences would just, you would go batshit crazy if you were to know the reality of this.
It's terrifying that the high stakes decisions that are made on like this horrible research methodology, which I'm not saying is like completely without use relative to like not even engaging with any data, but it's pretty darn close. But another thought that I have about doing.
Eran Halperin: One of the points that you raised was really interesting because for me, one of the main dilemma, you know, throughout our work with politicians, people in education or in different areas in the Israeli society is, you know, asking ourselves, what's a good enough data or evidence that we have?
*Rob Willer:** Yes. That’s what I wanted to talk about too. Yeah.
Eran Halperin: And it's hard for researchers to go beyond the data. You know, you have your evidence on this study and it's a two by two study and you manipulated something and found something else. And then you say, I can't say something beyond that.
But when you work with actual people in actual projects or campaigns, they want you to provide answers also to things that you don't have in your data. And my answer to this question is quite clear because I think that I always think about their alternative.
And the alternative is to base their decisions on pure intuition, intuition and experience. And from my perspective, even if I haven't studied directly a certain question, I do have the knowledge and the depth in terms of understanding the theories, the aggregate of everything that we have in the field in order to give good advice, even if I haven't studied something really specifically. But it's hard.
It's getting out of our, I would say, our norms or the way we usually operate. And at least for me, it took some time to get there.
Rob Willer: It totally took me time too. And I do have this other thought that may seem to contradict the last thing that I think we both agreed on, which is that I do think that this work, when you start doing the applied work, it really challenges you to try to really get it right. Like, did you get it right?
Did you do the work well? Is the work replicable? Is it conducted with the highest integrity and quality that you can do?
Because these sorts of opportunities, I do think they separate people in terms of what their core motivations are. Because if your motivation is to help, then when you have an opportunity for impact, the quality of your work is going to go up. And if your motivation is for yourself or something, then when you have that opportunity for greater relevance, the quality of your work will go down, arguably, because you'll be able to produce sexier findings with greater confidence and so on.
And so, it's a real differentiator how people approach that decision and whether they crank up the rigor or crank it down in the face of the opportunity for influence.
Eran Halperin: I agree.
Rob Willer: So, Eran, you've got this on the ground, but also in the data sets, vantage point on the Israeli-Palestinian situation, on the current situation in Israel. What do you think at a high level? Are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? What are you thinking?
Eran Halperin: So, as I said at the beginning, I mean, I understand why many people are worried, but I would say that at the same time, I'm very, very optimistic. And I'm very optimistic because I think that what happened right now is important beyond the specific judicial reform that was the reason for the protest. And in many, many ways, this current government made a huge favor to anyone who cares about democracy in Israel, because they, in a way, recreated what I would call the democratic camp in Israel.
So many groups that are very different from each other in terms of their ideologies, like joined together to say, we really, really care about Israeli democracy. And Israeli democracy has been in a decrease for almost 20 years now. And no one has waken it up the way the current government has done right now.
And what we see now, not only on the streets, but also in public opinion data, is a huge, huge consensus among both Jews and Arabs going against the actions of the current government and are basically saying also, you know, we're not going to stop by succeeding to pose this judicial reform. We're going to go further and re-examine the Israeli democracy and the practices of the current government. And I'm very, very optimistic that what's happening right now on the streets will be translated into movements and then into a political power that can create real change.
Because if people would define themselves and, you know, for people in the US, it's very it's almost obvious that, you know, some people define themselves as Democrats. OK, so it's part of the like demo in Israel. It's a new thing.
So people who for many, many years didn't see democracy as their main or core identity part now define themselves as part of the Democratic camp. And when I look at the future, I'm saying, OK, so this would have implications on other issues as well. You can see yourself as if your core identity is being a Democrat.
How can you live with occupation? How can you live with discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel? How can you live with other non-democratic practices that we see in the Israeli society?
So in many, many ways, this protest added many, many groups that previously were not part of the left-wing or what has been defined as a left-wing camp in Israel and now is reconstructed as a Democratic camp. So I think that maybe there is a chance that some very, very positive things will happen in the future of the Israeli society.
Rob Willer: Yeah. Yeah. Crisis precipitates change.
Eran Halperin: Exactly. Yeah. And when you do your studies looking at the American democracy, effective polarization, main conflicts and challenges within the US society, are you optimistic, pessimistic? Where would you locate yourself on this axis?
Rob Willer: I don't know if I'm optimistic, man. Like you, I'm kind of in the social change game. You know, I'm most interested in affecting some sort of positive social change or supporting positive social change in society.
And so I worry about worsening political divisions. Like I don't think the trends have turned, you know, like things are continuing to get worse. And they stand as a huge barrier to affecting social change.
And so I think it's going to get a bit worse before it turns, you know. And it may be a similar sort of, oh, wow, it got this bad, that it now marshals, you know, a large enough majority, you know, to get through the sclerotic American federal system and get some sort of significant legislation passed that can help with things like climate change, for example. So I guess that's the way I would view it.
If I was to put my optimistic hat on, I would say that there has been an emergence over the last maybe decade or so of higher tech political action, just more data driven strategic work happening in the spaces that I'm aware of and plugged into and care about seeing succeed. And that duality I was talking about before of like ideological homogeneity can lead to the kind of like great new ideas and fire of mobilization that you need for effective collective action, but it can also deprive you of perspective taking and analytical perspective. I'm hoping that we can kind of get both those things in the US through a division of labor and that folks like me can plug into that like analytical operation and support probably the real actors that drive change.
At least, yeah, if we did, that would be a great thing. But Eran, I want to say thank you for your excellent work in this context. It's really, really inspiring.
It's a tremendous example of applied behavioral science on politics, the likes of which I don't know if I've ever even heard of before. So keep it up.
Eran Halperin: And I can definitely say the same thing about your work. And it's also been a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed it. It’s been a great opportunity for my last week here in the US before going back to Israel.
Rob Willer: So, Eran, did you have a big project, a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences type project, like a book project that you were working on before getting pulled away by all this?
Eran Halperin: No, I wrote a book. I finished it yesterday. But I think I told you I wrote a book in Hebrew.
**Rob Willer: That’s amazing! Yeah.
Eran Halperin: For the first time, I decided to write a book that's, you know, targeting like the target is the Israeli society. I've never written anything in Hebrew. You know, all my books are in English and my academic papers are in Hebrew.
And for many years, I've been told you should write something in Hebrew because people, you know, most Israelis won't read stuff in English. So I decided to write a book. So yeah, and I actually finished like the first draft yesterday.
And it's a book that is like describing the way my research and work can say something interesting about what's happening in the Israeli society today and also what should be done, you know, maybe to create change in this society. To be honest, I don't know if it's good, the book, because it's very, very different from anything that I've done in my life. But it was fun.
In English, it's love to hate, question mark, the Israeli society in its journey to radicalization. Thank you.
Rob Willer: Yeah, thank you.
Narrator: That was Eran Halperin in Conversation with Robb Willer. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.