https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/12/how-violent-protest-can-backfire/?fbclid=IwAR0XibEdob5Dc7Kw_c2THWSyxXnhviNQsPTK-tLr6VsuUaU4lDbhvTQUcQk
So far Trump's threats to use government violence seems to have offset the usual response to violent protests.
By Melissa De Witte
October 12, 2018
Protestors are not helping their cause when they turn violent toward their opposition. In fact, their aggressions could increase support for the very people they’re protesting against, according to new research by Stanford sociologist Robb Willer.
The research – inspired by recent confrontations between white nationalist protesters and anti-racist counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Berkeley, California – found that violence by anti-racist protesters can lead people to view them as unreasonable, a perception that may lead to people identifying less with the group. However, violence by white supremacists didn’t change people’s opinion because they already saw the white supremacists as extremely unreasonable, said Robb Willer in a paper published Oct. 11 in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.
•••••
“Our central finding is that even protesters who otherwise enjoy high levels of public support – anti-racist activists counter-protesting a gathering of white nationalists – can lose support from the general public if they use violence,” said Willer. “In fact, we found that support for white nationalists was heightened among those who read that anti-racist counter-protesters had attacked them.”
•••••
Because white nationalists are a widely despised group known for violence, they have little to lose if they can draw out violence from anti-racists.
“Violence did little, if any, damage to their reputations,” said the researchers in the paper. “Conversely, violence by anti-racists can not only damage public support for anti-racists; as our results show, it can also increase support for the white nationalist protesters themselves.”
•••••
No comments:
Post a Comment