Developing efficacy and emotion routes to solidarity-based and violent collective action

This thesis follows two independent lines of investigation on social psychological predictors of collective action, focusing on solidarity-based action among bystander groups in the first part, and violent forms of collective action in the second part. In Studies 1-3, I examine predictors of collective action among third parties in solidarity with a disadvantaged group by extending a recent model which proposes two pathways to collective action, one emotion-based and the other efficacy-based (van Zomeren, Spears, Fischer, & Leach, 2004). I show that moral outrage and feelings of empathy with a disadvantaged group play an important role in predicting solidarity-based collective action tendencies, while sympathy seems to be an unreliable predictor. I also provide evidence that the perceived efficacy of collective action at consolidating the identity of the protesting movement can influence collective action tendencies directly but also indirectly by feeding into perceptions of the action’s political efficacy. In Studies 4-7, I examine whether the pursuit of violent forms of collective action is subject to considerations regarding the efficacy of both violent and nonviolent forms of action, and the interaction between these two. I show that violence support and violent action tendencies are generally positively predicted by violence efficacy but not consistently negatively predicted by nonviolence efficacy, as nonviolence efficacy and violence efficacy appear to interact in some contexts (Studies 4-6). Importantly, my studies reveal that people are more supportive of violent action the more efficacious it seems, even if nonviolent action is also a promising strategy. Further, when violent action seems to have low efficacy, people may still support its pursuit if they deem nonviolence to have low efficacy as well. Overall, the findings of this thesis contribute to current scholarly efforts at identifying novel predictors of collective action as well as predictors of different forms of collective action