Colin Wayne Leach is a social psychologist who also wears a bunch of other social science hats. He approaches the social world by appreciating its nature as a system of interconnected parts. He’s made strides in a lot of research areas, including emotion, prejudice, and morality.
In our conversation, we focus on his work on protest as a vehicle for social change. He shares how he thinks about protest and the system it’s embedded in, and walks us through what protest is and how we can understand it better.
If you’re interested to learn more, you can read a great recent summary of Colin’s perspective in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (Leach et al., 2024)
Transcript
Andy Luttrell: We are living in what seems to be an age of mass protest. People are banding together like never before to disrupt and call for change. And sure, the idea of protest isn’t new. In the US, everyone learns about things like the Boston Tea Party and the Whiskey Rebellion in their American History classes, Gandhi’s Salt March in India, and the occupation of Tiananmen Square in China speak to a protest as a global practice that’s been going on for a long time.
But there is also reason to say that protest is on the rise. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that from 2009 to 2019 mass protests increased by about 11.5% every year, particularly in places like the Middle East and North Africa.
One recent book by Isabel Ortiz and her colleagues surveys almost 3,000 protests stemming from 900 movements across more than a 100 countries, just between the years of 2006 and 2020. They include calls for everything from democracy, to jobs, to civil rights, to global justice, rallying against corruption of many forms.
Their analysis highlights 250 methods of nonviolent protest, including mass petitions, rallying social networks, flash mobs, picketing, marches, boycotts, strikes, disobedience, chaining yourself to a building, and guerrilla theater. There are lots of ways to marshal the power of people to protest.
But what exactly is the goal? What drives people to protest and what good does it do? Where does protest fit in the bigger picture? Well, I refuse to be silent until I find out.
You are listening to Opinion Science, the show about our opinion, where they come from, and how we talk about them. I’m Andy Luttrell.
This week I’m excited to share a conversation with Colin Wayne Leach. He’s a professor of psychology at Columbia University, although he wears a lot of other social science hats, too.
I met Colin earlier this year at this very cool, tiny conference in Belgium. It was a meeting focused on how people make sense of each other, like how we form impressions and the sorts of traits that people care about most when they’re meeting new people. There was a really neat mix of people there from different parts of the world, with different ways of thinking about social science.
It was a good time. And there was Belgian beer and frites nearby. So, I was happy. But I found I kept striking up conversation with Colin. We clicked on how we think about what’s important when building a full sense of the psychology of this or that.
When I got back home, I reached out and asked if he wanted to be on the podcast. And he was game, so here we are. We talked mostly about his work on protest; what it is, why it happens, and what it does. He also approaches the idea of protest, like most of the things he studies, by thinking of the bigger systems in which it operates.
So, we start out by breaking down what he means by systems and then wind our way around what that means for protest as a vehicle for social change.
So, we go now to my chat with Colin Wayne Leach.
Andy Luttrell: A good place to start is this systems approach to understanding people. This seems pretty central to how you do business, and it’s, I think, interesting because it has not quite become like this mainstream model of social science. So, maybe just to set the stage, could you walk us all through what it means to approach Social Science from a systems perspective?
Colin Wayne Leach: I think it’s easier explained not talking about it in terms of psychology for some reason. I can come to psychology, but I usually use two examples to explain it.
The first one is the one that I came to it through, which is biology. Biology is an inherently system science, and it’s a system science because there’s really no other way to understand living organisms except as systems.
It seems obvious to people that if you’re studying, I don’t know, a virus, that it’s a living system that it jumps from place to place from person to person. Some people are more susceptible to a virus than others. Once it reaches the critical mass, it can then explode and take off, especially maybe with COVID experience, everybody understands viruses and transmission a lot better.
You can study a virus as a biological living system at the cellular level, just in isolation, like in a petri dish. You can study it in a person and so, therefore, it interacts with all that person’s living systems, like do they have a cardiac history? What’s their weight? What’s their general health? They have respiratory issues and that influences how the virus operates. You can study it between people, like one person catches it from another. How much are they exposed? You can study it in a classroom. Are kids exposed to each other? You can study it in a school district, a town, a state, a country, or the world.
So, I think, when we think about biological systems, we think it’s obvious that they’re living things, that they’re changing over time in sometimes unpredictable ways. And that they move across. You can study them on many different levels. Like I just gave from the cell to society, every level affects the other level.
That seems obvious when we talk about something like biology. And it also may be more obvious to people when we talk about something like weather. For a long time, weather was not studied fully as a dynamical system. And that’s why our forecasts for weather were not that great.
So, anybody who is more than 20 years old has the experience of weather forecasts that are wrong a lot of the time. But now weather forecasts are very good, especially for a 2 or 3-day window. And that was because weather scientists fully embraced systems thinking. They were underestimating the complexity of the thing they were trying to predict, and once they embraced it and realized that, well, you can’t just follow this weather front that’s coming. You’ve got to see what the temperatures are, what the airflow is, where in altitude it is.
Once you kind of thought about all the key parameters that would influence how that weather system developed, you could get better at predicting where it would go, how strong it would be, and what it would do.
Now, of course, it’s very complex, so we can’t really predict it beyond a couple of days, but 2 or 3 days is great. And if it’s a tropical storm or a hurricane, 2, 3 days is really great.
My first love in science was biology, and I started as a biology major in college and that’s what really attracted me. I was always really attracted to living systems, plants, and ecology. If I had gone to school now, probably I would have been an environmental scientist, I imagine ’cause that’s what really attracted me.
But then, of course, I also am just fascinated by people. And so to me, I thought, well, of course, people are basically just like plants and viruses. We were in systems. We are systems and we live in systems. So, to me, that’s just how it made sense for me to understand people and people in society.
But I was shocked by the fact that most psychologists and many social scientists don’t think about people that way, even if they kind of know it’s true. I think a lot of social scientists or behavioral scientists think, well, it’s too complicated or it’s too hard to explain to people, or I don’t know what they think.
So, for me, it’s been a whole career of like, why don’t we study this thing the way that we know that it is and just trying to find opportunities to move closer and closer to studying it in a way that maps on to how I think it really works
Andy Luttrell: Is there, if you were to caricature like this, the typical social science approach that doesn’t account for systems? To make it a little more concrete, what is it that that does that is missing a systems approach?
Colin Wayne Leach: So, I mean, at the simplest level, what it does is it misunderstands causality. And so, a lot of behavioral sciences, and especially, micro behavioral sciences like psychology, or even to some degree of microeconomics, we want to think about cause and effect in a mechanistic way. One cause, one effect, always, in all time, forever, for everybody. And this is not systems thinking, because that can’t be true.
And we often assume that, therefore, if we produce a cause and it has an effect, we assume that that tells us something definitive about the relationship between two things. Like, one thing is always a cause, and one thing is always an effect. And that can’t be true. And so that’s like the simplest example.
And so what does that do? But I get it. It’s tempting. Like, oh, the world is complicated. If I can at least sort out what the causes are, and what the effects are, then that really helps me like make sense of the world, but it’s a false sense of security and it leads you to all of these solutions.
We do that all the time. We do that in government policy. We do that in tax policy. We do that. We’re like, Oh, here’s the cause. Let’s hammer away at this thing and it’ll have all these effects. And then it doesn’t work. And we’re like, huh? Because that cause also has causes and that effect, it can also be a cause.
And so if you don’t understand it as a system and understand the relationship between those two things in a fuller way, you’re stuck with these simple answers that don’t often work.
Andy Luttrell: And if we bring that systems approach into psychology, or behavioral science, more generally, kind of the analogy that you were drawing with Biology, biological systems makes me think, would you distinguish between like internal systems and external systems? Like, one way of looking at it is sort of like a system of psychological processes that exist within a person, but those are always interacting with larger systems, like a group or community or society. Am I tracking what you mean by a system, if I put it that way?
Colin Wayne Leach: I mean to explain it, yes, but ultimately, the goal would be to actually move away from internal and external because once you fully embrace the perspective, that distinction starts to break down. Because how do things get inside? Well, they come from outside and then what happens to the stuff inside? Well, it goes outside. So yes, as a way to sort of organize it.
I have another example for this that I use a lot in teaching. If we think about birth defects, we can think about them as something genetic that’s in the mother or the child that’s passed between mother and child.
But in fact, birth defects, many of them are caused by something called teratogens. And they are affected by both systems, the baby system, the mother system, and the ecological system. Like if you’re exposed to pollution, or what have you. So, the operation of that chemical in the body that can produce birth defects is internal and external at the same time. They’re influencing each other.
So yes, to explain it. We could say internal and external, but ultimately, the goal is to actually move away from that, and just to specify systems, and realize that they may look internal, but they can be so deeply enmeshed with the external that it doesn’t really make sense.
Andy Luttrell: So, if we bring this into, our topic of the day is protest as, like collective action, a challenge for social change. If we apply a systems level. So what I want to be able to do is like be able to bridge these, which is, I know what you’ve already done is take the systems level approach to protest, but maybe to begin, since we’re in definition territory, let’s talk about what a protest is.
Colin Wayne Leach: Just a simple definition, not a systems definition.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. Let’s just start with like, what would count as a protest?
Colin Wayne Leach: I mean, I didn’t really think about it really broadly or protest is any. So, maybe we can limit a little bit to a collective protest.
Because, of course, we can protest individually. So collective protest is any group of people, two or more, who are basically complaining about some believed wrong that they want addressed or redressed in some way. That’s it.
Andy Luttrell: And so I think what was interesting in reading about how you’ve summarized this literature is like how many forms that can take, right? So, that’s a nice, clean definition, because it’s just like, well, what’s at the root of all of these very different things that can happen? But it seems like, yeah, like, sort of expressing an injustice. Is it always injustice? Would you put it in moral terms like that or just…?
Colin Wayne Leach: Yeah. See I’m trying to gloss this. I think I said believed wrong, just again try to not assume too much about the form of the wrong. So, yes, often it’s experienced as an injustice, but I think I sort of believed wrong is a little bit better formal definition. But, yes, often it’s experienced as an injustice.
Andy Luttrell: To illustrate the variety of forms this can take, what are some of the forms that it can take?
Colin Wayne Leach: I mean, we can think about protest all the way down to the smallest form. It could be two employees going to their supervisor and complaining about pay increases that year because they think it wasn’t right. They didn’t get what they were entitled to. As simple as that. Or it could be, I live in New York City. It could be two neighbors in a building complaining to the management that the hallway hasn’t been painted recently and the paint is peeling.
So, we can think about it in a very micro way. And in fact, that’s useful because I think, look, people protest pretty often actually at that level. Then, you can think about it going all the way up the scale. It can be protesting about a policy at your job or at your school or what have you that you think isn’t right. Admissions policies in schools, for example, or how places in classroom classes or at schools get distributed.
It could be about the content of what’s being taught in your kid’s classroom. Parents can get together and part of the parent teacher association could be formal in that way or it could be just a bunch of parents get together and say we’re not happy with these books that you’re teaching or the stuff that you’re not teaching.
And so what really varies there is like the formalization of it. Like what’s the arm of it? Is it people sort of organically getting together without any formal group or institution to do it themselves as a collective or is it some more formal thing, like through an organization or a union or a co-op board or whatever it is? So that’s like the means of it, like the organizational means of it, let’s say.
Then, the size. How big of a collective, how formally organized, and then of course the form. Is it circulating a petition to get other people to sign on to, to say that they agree to your complaint and they want it redressed? Is it picketing, standing in front of the school with signs? Is it flooding the school board members with phone calls, lobbying for the position or is it calling like a community meeting or going to the school board and having a collective complaint, all the way up to organizing a street protest, civil disobedience, blocking the street?
They’re all the same thing at the end. That is, they’re motivated by the same thing. Like we want to express disagreement with something that we think isn’t right, but they can take any form from small to large, formal to informal, formally organized to informally organized, sort of quiet and polite, like a petition to very disruptive, like civil disobedience.
Andy Luttrell: Would you say that the intent for change is central or not? Like that wasn’t in the definition. Like if it’s just a bunch of people saying we just want everyone to know that we loved the new Deadpool movie or whatever, or we hated it. If I was like, I just want everyone to know I hated this movie. I’m together with people complaining about something that I think was wrong in a maybe less loaded way. But if I don’t actually care if anything changes, is it really a protest?
Colin Wayne Leach: It is because change is complicated and change actually can take time. And so actually I would say smart protest movements are realistic about their goals at the given moment. And again, this is systems thinking. What does the system most allow to change? So systems, once they’re established, they develop some inertia and they’re hard to change. And so smart protest movements think about what in the system is most amenable or open to change and to work on that.
So I’ll give you a concrete example that you just mentioned. The first goal of a protest… So, let’s go to the school board one. I live in a school district and I’m not happy about the curriculum and there’s some other parents and they’re also unhappy and we organize ourselves. Our first task might be not running to the school board, the five of us and complaining. Our first task in the protest might be who else agrees. What do we agree on? What’s our platform? And what can we do? And so that might be the first form of protest is organizing ourselves and letting people know, getting the word out there. We think this is wrong and attracting people, more people to that growing movement, how many parents also agree?
Maybe it’s a majority of us. Maybe the school board is doing something that almost none of us agree to. And so that’s very smart because that’s the appropriate form of protest when you don’t know how many other people agree with you. You don’t know what odds you’re facing. You don’t know what’s possible.
It actually makes sense to complain first and to see who your audience is and to reach them, to see how big they are and then to strategize about what can be changed. Once you sort of know who you’re with, what you can do, what resources you have, and how widespread your complaint is.
Andy Luttrell: It seems like one of the key questions would have been like, is protesting effective? And that’s when I started to think, like, well, to answer that question, you need to know what the goal of that is to stack up what happens. And so maybe a less loaded way of putting it is like, based on what we know about protests in behavioral science, what do they do? What are the typical consequences of protest as collective action?
Colin Wayne Leach: Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s been a lot of nice work on this, like by Omar Wasow and some other people. So, in many ways, it’s a more sort of sociological political science question, and I think they’ve been better at answering it.
I think there’s really interesting and more psychological questions about do people notice the effects of protest and are they influenced by it? That’s a whole interesting question. I think that that work I’m referring to doesn’t necessarily do. But in terms of the actual effectiveness in the world, I think there’s pretty good evidence now that the right form of protest can do a couple of things.
One, it can shift how we think about things. It can shift, a framing of things. And so the classic example of this, of course, is the Vietnam War and anti-war protests in general. So, mass protests can make people question the legitimacy of something like war, especially if they’re already wondering about it.
So that the Vietnam war example is a really good one because it also really shows you the power of systems. There were protests against the Vietnam war for a long time from the beginning of the war, but they were smaller scale. And even when they were larger scale, there just wasn’t enough. There was so much sort of fervor about it and commitment to it that the system just wasn’t open to change.
But then, of course, what happens on the Nightly News has been well documented. The Nightly News, there’s all this documentation of U.S. soldiers being killed in Vietnam. And people start to see the consequences and the cost. And then a question opens up, like, is this a good thing? Should we be doing this?
And that moment opened up the chance for protests to then shift opinion. And then therefore there was that combination, of people thinking like, wow, the costs of this are really high. And we’re destroying a place like, using weapons that destroy whole forests and vegetation.
This looks really ugly and apocalyptic and all these people are dying. Does this make sense? And then you have been people saying, no, it doesn’t make sense. And here’s the reasons why. And so we see like a massive shift in attitudinal support for the Vietnam War through these system processes.
And that can happen and that does happen, not always as dramatic as that. But when there are these moments where people start to question, their attitudes and there’s a little opening up or unfreezing, as Lewin would call it. There’s a moment to change and then you see a bunch of people who you trust, or a whole lot of people saying, yes, this should change. This is wrong.
That creates this possibility of ideological or attitudinal shift that might not be possible otherwise. So, I think that’s kind of, in many ways, the best documented, maybe most obvious effect of protest. And what’s funny about all of these ways that protest is effective is like, we know about minority influence, protesters themselves almost never get the credit for these changes.
At some level, the change can happen more easily when you don’t say it’s because of the protesters. There’s some other reason. Like, Oh, we woke up and saw the light or the cost was too great to the war. Like some other reason.
Andy Luttrell: It’s funny because you review evidence that like, people generally have negative attitudes toward protesting. People don’t love the idea of it. And so it seems like that’s what’s responsible for this. People don’t want to credit protests because that seems yucky, but like, they wouldn’t have rethought their take on this were it not for a bunch of people raising the question collectively.
Colin Wayne Leach: Yeah. Well, I actually think it’s two things. I’m so glad you brought that up because it’s so important. I think it is that, that people just in general have negative attitudes toward protest. They’re disruptive. People think that maybe they’re potentially violent or out of control or what have you. That’s true.
But then we also combine that with what we know about minority influence, which is that in general we don’t like for a small number of people to be like smarter than us or to be right about something that we weren’t right about. Like that little group over there knew better all along. Like we’re not fond of that idea.
So you put those two things together and yes, then it makes it hard to actually attribute the change to the protesters and not something else.
Andy Luttrell: But it speaks to the possible power of it. That it could have influence in spite of these negative attitudes and these resentments about being told you’re wrong, but it just, yeah, I wonder if it’s just sort of this like subtle social norm and repeated messaging that just kind of burrows in. This is not unusual for persuasion for people to not quite account for like why they change their mind, but just go like, no, no, no, I’ve come around or they go like, I kind of always thought this way.
Colin Wayne Leach: That’s right. But for that to work… so this is why there’s such a battle around the legitimacy of protest. So we see this all around. This is why that battle is so important that sort of people who are trying to stop any kind of movement toward the protest message, the best way to do that is to de-legitimize, to criticize, to morally question the protesters, to limit that influence because you don’t want to be influenced by an illegitimate, crazy, radical, out of control, whatever, a group of people.
And that’s why protesters are also then battling or the allies of protesters are always battling to establish the moral and political or other legitimacy of the protest as a reasonable minority opinion.
So, that’s why so much of the debate about protests is about the legitimacy of the protesters and the protests to keep it in the frame as a moral possibility that might have influence.
Andy Luttrell: That was one thing I hadn’t really appreciated until I was prepping for, for talking to you today, which is, like, so much of the coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, particularly in 2020, was all about this, like, narrative about violence and disruption.
And you reviewed this data that campaign worked. People overwhelmingly had this impression of what was going on, but only in hindsight is it striking me that like, well, I mean, it wasn’t about disputing the message of the protesters so much, it was about sort of putting the focus on the protesters themselves and what they were doing.
And so it just seems kind of telling to me that that was the move, was to delegitimize these people and their method, as opposed to saying anything about the message itself.
Colin Wayne Leach: Yeah, it’s really funny because that is the kind of default strategy. And what’s also striking to me is that like that’s also the default strategy and media coverage, like their communication scholars have this thing called the protest paradigm.
And it’s this way of representing protest as violent, as disruptive, as out of control, and it’s actually across so many different societies, across decades. It goes back to the Vietnam War examples I was telling you about. And decade after decade, even left-wing, right-wing media, it doesn’t matter. There’s just this general way of talking about protests that frames it that way and it’s very powerful.
In the case of Black Lives Matter, it’s interesting because I think there was actually a different move in the beginning to try to delegitimize it, and it didn’t work. And so, in the end, we end up seeing the default strategy, which is that the protesters and the protest is illegitimate.
But in fact, in the early days, there was this debate about the message itself. And this was the debate about All Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and Black Lives Matter. That was the way to delegitimize the message. Like, is the message that black lives matter, is it exclusionary? Is it so focused on a particular group that it’s like somehow advantaging that group and ignoring other people or sort of devaluing human life in general?
So, there was that debate and we saw that debate play out for a couple of years actually in 2015, 16, 17. But then, it kind of got settled, in popular media and news media and social media and that people are like, well, no, that’s not what the message means. And they kind of won that, like, sort of ideological battle. And so then the strategy of delegitimizing the protesters and the protest itself really kicks in.
Andy Luttrell: I wonder, it’s a good chance to talk about this difference. What seems like a fundamental difference in protest strategy, at least in the way people think about them, is this kind of dichotomy of peaceful and violent protest.
And it seems like there’s this kind of, I don’t know what to do about it, double jeopardy of them. Where on the one hand, a violent protest, or at least a protest that’s perceived as violent or disruptive, is effective at capturing people’s attention. But it comes alongside, like, these things that people are quite willing to say are bad and reason not to even give credit to the message.
But on the other hand, I remember talking to people about this, who in their estimation, Black Lives Matter was too disruptive and too violent. And I was just like, but I don’t know what you do, because on the other hand, when something is super nonviolent and peaceful, it is effectively reaching people better because people tolerate that more, but it probably isn’t breaking through the noise as much. So, that message is, maybe, not getting through.
And so, it just seems like, I don’t know how these scales could possibly ever be, perfectly in balance. And so based on what you understand about how people approach protests, how do you think about that dichotomy?
Colin Wayne Leach: I mean this is a complicated thing. Let me think about how to approach it.
I think you’re putting your finger on something very, very important, and maybe, it’ll be helpful to distinguish it. So, part of the difficulty is that protest movements, not all actually but for the most part popular protest movements want attention. They want public attention.
So now this gets you into the bind that you’re talking about, because how do you get attention? Well, you get attention by doing things that are out of the ordinary, that are disruptive, that require attention. And so, that’s the dilemma.
But it actually comes from needing attention. It’s not inherent to protest. And it may not even be the most effective means. But if it’s something where you’re trying to change people’s attitudes or you’re trying to change popular opinion, or you’re trying to build popular support for, I don’t know, a new policy or a new way of doing things or ending something, then you’re basically dependent on public attention.
And so you’ve got to figure out ways to get attention. This is the dilemma. You have to get attention long enough to get your message across. But you can’t get the attention in a way that de-legitimizes your message or you. And so, yes, it’s tough.
So that’s why some of these movements organize mass protests that go through particular routes of the city street that are really central to the area or what have you. That’s why you have a protest in a central area because you want people to see you. You could do it out in the middle of nowhere and it wouldn’t have the effect. So, you do it like someplace visible, and then sometimes you choose strategies of blocking traffic or closing something down or surrounding a federal building and stopping access again, to get more attention from the people who work there, but also because you think the news will cover it.
An interesting example of this also is, so like in the formal way that it’s counted for violence and property destruction often put together, property destruction is really, really interesting because we often see protests represented as destroying property, like destroying businesses, breaking windows and this kind of thing. But in fact, a lot of protests engage in a different kind of property destruction, which would be, for example, defacing or taking down statues that represent some issue, like, I don’t know, confederacy statues, for example.
That’s an interesting example to me, because obviously it’s public property, it’s defacement or defilement or what have you, but it’s actually central to the message. Like this represents something that we don’t agree with, and we think our society shouldn’t be symbolizing and celebrating confederate heroes in this place. I don’t know, something like that.
That’s a really nice example, in fact, of something that most people would be against, property destruction. But there’s a message there, like we’re actually doing this for a purpose, and there’s some really nice examples of this, of where something that you would think would turn a lot of people off, actually, when it was clear what the message was and why it was done, actually convinced people.
So, I think that’s the bind, keeping the attention, but also making sure that the action, especially disruptive, and it’s really breaking a lot of norms of violence or crime or what have you, that it’s clear that what the message is, because people do think, why would people do that?
They do ask that question. Why would people engage in that? Why would people lay down in the street and block traffic? Why would people lock arms, and face down police and ride gear. People do wonder like, what are they so committed to that they would do that?
And then of course we have extreme examples of, self-immolation, like lighting yourself on fire. This is the ultimate example of engaging in violence toward the self to say, I’m so disturbed by this thing that I’m going to actually destroy my physical being to get your attention and to show you how committed I am to tell you about this wrong.
So, a disruptive protest is that in its essence, if it’s strategic and planned and intentional, that is the goal. And that’s why it can work when people see that when they make the inference that those people are engaging in something radical and different and disruptive because they’re so disturbed and bothered by what’s happening that they’re showing this commitment to getting us to pay attention and to fix it.
Andy Luttrell: It makes me wonder. That makes complete sense. And it also reminds me of the recent climate change activists who will like to throw paint on the Mona Lisa or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, that’s getting attention, but there is something about it where it’s just like, when I ask, why are you doing this?
I go, I don’t know. I don’t reach the same kind of conclusion as I do when it seems like someone is kind of at their limit and is trying to raise awareness. And so, yeah, it just seems like it’s this real delicate, tricky thing of that, like attracting attention, but in the right way and in a way that like raises the question it’s meant to raise without turning too many people off. Idon’t know where that perfect balance point is.
Colin Wayne Leach: It is a tough balance, but this is the dilemma that protesters face when they strategize and this is probably why there’s so many different strategies. And this is why you have strategies that might seem extreme or like the hunger strike is another great example.
The hunger strike is obviously a few steps away from self-immolation, although it can end up to people being really sick or dying. So like, I’m so committed to this and I want you to pay so much attention that I’m going to deprive myself. I’m going to harm my own health to get you to pay attention. It’s the same kind of message. It’s also super interesting because even like the whole occupy strategy or the version that we saw more recently with encampments on college campuses. That’s another version of that. We’re going to stop our lives and pick up and move to this place and live together to show to you that there’s another way to do things. We’re going to disrupt our own lives to show you how much this matters to us.
So it’s another attempt to try to tie the disruptiveness or the unusualness of the action to the why message, because people are so clear that without the why, as you said, it just looks extreme. It just looks strange. And so, that’s the thing. And that’s why I think these different strategies are tried to get people’s attention and to keep it, to communicate to them, this matters to me so much that I’m willing to risk these things to myself, to get you to pay attention to why I’m doing it.
Andy Luttrell: This is I’m sure an impossible question, but in the pantheon of communication strategies for effecting social change, where does protest seem to fit in? I’m sure you’re going to find some people who say like, it’s the gold standard, others who are going to say like last resort, but in terms of efficacy at what it intends to do to the extent that it intends to do anything, what’s your sense? How does protesting fit into other methods of social change?
Colin Wayne Leach: Can you just give me an example? Like what other methods are you thinking about in comparison?
Andy Luttrell: I mean, I guess that is a version of the question too, like, is all social change ultimately protest? Is there any other way of affecting social change without an element of protest in it?
Colin Wayne Leach: It’s a good question. I think we should be clear that protest, as we’re talking about it, it’s definitely like what David Scott and other people’s call a weapon of the weak. You protest because you can’t just walk in and demand change. So let’s start there. That’s very important.
There are other people. Other collectives, organizations where when something’s not going their way, they can call a meeting and have a meeting and be like, look, we’re not happy with this. You need to change it. And they might even be able to say, and there’ll be consequences if you don’t.
So that’s a different, that’s obviously a complaint and a negotiation, but it’s a very different kind of complaint. So, yes, I think maybe that’s an important starting point.
Protests, as we’re talking about it, assume that you do not have the power or status or wherewithal to just complain or to threaten consequences and get change done.
So you have to rely on people power. You have to rely on agitation and you have to rely often but not always on winning over allies who may be more powerful than you or just swelling your numbers so that it’s so big that that becomes a power in itself. But yes, that’s the other hidden thing behind protest that protest mass protest or collective protest is a way of trying to generate power by people who don’t have it inherently, given how the system operates.
Andy Luttrell: And that, I mean, also probably brings us nicely full circle back to talking about this as a systems-level approach. So, part of what I wonder is, as a social psychologist, what is my role in understanding protest? Like the models that I would typically use don’t easily plug in. And maybe that’s why you haven’t seen as much like bread and butter social psychology work on protest. So where does a behavioral scientist fit in in terms of contributing to understanding this phenomenon?
Colin Wayne Leach: I mean, I would say everywhere. And I would say even in my own work because I’m interested in the systems approach. I’ve taken like really different approaches to just studying protest because it’s happening at so many different levels. There are many different ways of understanding it. We’ve done some work where that’s very sort of cognitive neuroscience, affective neuroscience, where we expose people to images of protest.
For example, the whole thing that there’s this general negative attitude toward protest, I find that super interesting. And I thought, you know what, that should show up. Like if people, in general, should have an inherent aversion at some level to particular forms of protest. And that should play out in the way that we know that aversions and sort of deep-held negative attitudes play out. If you just show people some images, they should start to show you the cognitive and physiological and affective signs of, I don’t like this thing. And we find that.
So, I think that’s really powerful and that’s really important to understand, like, how deep does this negative attitude go? Because it’s really important to understand then how that can be overcome to open people up to the message that valuable protesters might have or not. And so
I think this goes all the way down to the most micro level of people who study sort of attitudes and affect and what have you. And it goes all the way up to understanding political systems and community systems and sociological systems.
For example, if we take like climate change, understanding movement toward actual constructive action to mitigate climate change is going to require understanding at all those different levels that we’ve been talking about. Individual people sort of being open or not or changing their behavior or not, towns, states, communities, countries, understanding the international system where agreements get negotiated, understanding the way that commercial interests and popular environmental interests are battling it out in economic discussions or political discussions.
That’s the thing. And that’s, I think, the beauty of a systems perspective. There is an entry point for everybody, whatever your interest or expertise, it is operating and it is part of the system. And so you can be as narrowly focused the niche as you want in your understanding, as long as you realize it’s a piece of a really big jigsaw puzzle and it fits in and you just try to think a little bit about how the jigsaw fits in.
And so when I’m proselytizing for system science, which I am often, I try to say, not everybody has to do the whole thing. You don’t have to finish the whole puzzle. But just realize that whatever little piece you’re working on does fit into a puzzle, and then we can figure it out.
Andy Luttrell: I know you’ve been good at interfacing with people who study different levels of this, and that comes with its own challenges. And so, I’m curious how much of this is… It’s very nice to hear the idea that like, well, I can just kind of stay in my lane, keep an open mind but like nevertheless I’m just going to kind of do my thing.
As opposed to being like no I have to assemble like my magnificent 5 team of social scientists who cover every piece of the puzzle before we get any traction. And so, I wonder what do you think about that in terms of like the need for kind of at some point crossing the conversation streams?
Colin Wayne Leach: Oh no. Yes, absolutely. So it’s both. So, I think that’s where we get caught up. So people think, well, I can’t put together that team. I don’t know how to talk to those people. I can’t do that. And so what I’m saying is like, don’t let that be a hindrance. You can do your thing because there are people who are trying to do the other part as long as you do your thing, it could be very niche in a way that leaves it a little open to get connected to other things.
As long as you think a little bit about the fact that it’s a piece and you do it in a way that allows it to be connected. And so, in some ways I would say this is another unspoken or not often articulated reason for open science. The more open science is the more any little piece that anybody’s working on can be integrated into the big puzzle. The less open science is the harder that is.
So, I think, our old models of doing science made it really hard for those people who are trying to assemble to do it because everything was just so particular, so like written and done in this, basically in like a different dialect that you had to translate it and try to figure out. You couldn’t understand it.
We’re going to have to do this with climate change, with lots of issues, economic inequality, whatever your favorite societal issue is that you want to solve. We have to have some group of people who are committed to assembling all the stuff that we figured out and get it to fit together. And they can’t do that if it’s a tower of Babel of science where nothing can be compared or articulated or connected to the other.
So both things have to be true. People can keep doing what they’re doing, but try to do it in a way that recognizes that it’s a piece of a puzzle, and yes, we need teams of people to try to start to assemble the puzzle.
And I think other sciences are doing this, and certainly, I’ve been trying to do this myself, and I’ve been trying to work in this term that people use now that I think fits what we’re trying to do and what you probably really need to do to assemble the puzzle, in complex systems is not cross-disciplinary, not inter-disciplinary, but trans-disciplinary.
What that means is that it’s not putting disciplines together because when you put disciplines together, they have to like figure out how to talk to each other. You have to have this conversation about, well, you do things that way because of that and I do things this way because of that, and that takes a lot of time and you might not ever get there because some languages, they’re not mutually intelligible, but transdisciplinary approaches say, I mean, I guess the way that I think about it is, I don’t know if this is going to make sense to anybody, but I think about it as like a jazz quartet.
Like everybody’s playing a different instrument. And we have a basic sense of the melody, but we can go off in all these different directions that are specific to our way of thinking. But what ties us together is that common structure of the melody that ties us together. And so, we can solo and we can do our little things and we can whatever, but there’s a thing that ties us together that allows us to integrate it all as one thing. And so, I’ve been trying to do that for a while now with, and I can just give you the rundown. It’s pretty amazing.
So I’ve been working with an economist who studies social networks, a social worker, a bunch of data scientists who work on natural language processing, communication scholars, an art historian, some sociologists, computer engineers, and computer scientists. I think I’m missing a couple of disciplines and then, some psychologists.
If we had a meeting where we all sort of talked about the project from our disciplinary perspective, and we have done that, we get nowhere because there’s just so much assumed about how to do things right. What makes sense? So we all have to develop this common language or have that sense of a shared melody that ties us together.
So, I find that really powerful because that also means that even within a discipline, we can’t rely on all the stuff that we take for granted and all the shortcuts that we use. We use shortcuts to talk to each other like everybody does in everyday language. So, we don’t have to spell it all out.
But the thing about that is intellectually relying on disciplinary shortcuts actually then begins to lead us to take those shortcuts in our own thinking. And so, we’re kind of do a lot of the same thing. And I think that that limits the space for innovation when we’re not having to spell it out for each other, even within the discipline in a way that makes it clear exactly what we mean.
So I, oddly enough, doing this thing with all these different folks from these different disciplinary backgrounds in a way that tries to be transdisciplinary has made me think differently about my own discipline and makes me talk about it differently.
So even when I’m with a bunch of social psychologists and I could talk in a way that’s a shorthand, that’s our little dialect, I actually try not to. I’m out of the habit of doing it, because I want to spell things out in a way that’s more formal than that, that’s more explicit than that, that’s more open than that, and I think at the meeting that we were at together, you could see that, like, I don’t want to rely on those shortcuts, because too much is assumed and taken for granted, and we’re erasing too much important intellectual work about assumptions, and values and about process and about methods that really matter.
So, I think behavioral science and social science, is facing some really important questions now about our value, to society and how we do things. And I think it’s really a moment to really reflect on our practice, how we talk about what we do, how we do what we do, and really to do it in a different way that’s more open, that’s more explicit, that’s more formal, that lets us understand each other better, that lets us do better work, but also lets us connect whatever we’re doing to what everybody else is doing.
Andy Luttrell: That’s great. I love all of that. And I appreciate you taking the time to unpack it and talk about your work and just want to say, thanks for being here.
Colin Wayne Leach: Oh, thanks. Wow, that went quick. I talked a lot.
Andy Luttrell: Alrighty, that’ll do it for another episode of Opinion Science.
Thank you so much to Colin Wayne Leach for taking the time to talk with me for the podcast. It’s been great to catch up on his work.
As always, check out the episode webpage for a link to Colin’s website to learn more about what he does.
For more about this show, you can visit opinionsciencepodcast.com, where you’ll find all the past episodes, ways to support the show, and other fun stuff.
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I actually have some fun news that I haven’t shared yet on the podcast, but I should mention it because it concerns you. Last month, I was one of the recipients of an Excellence in Science Communication Award from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, in partnership with Schmidt Sciences.
It’s kind of a big deal, and I still kind of can’t believe it happened. The day after this episode comes out, I’m headed out to California to meet up with the other awardees for a few days of workshops and other exciting things. It’s pretty cool. And actually, one of the other awardees this year is Sam Jones, who I talked to for episode 16 of my Hot Psycom Summer special series in 2023.
Anyhow, I bring it up because although I do a handful of science communication stuff, this podcast is the main thing, and it was the heart of my nomination package. So, to the folks who have listened to this podcast, whether this is your first one, or you’ve heard all of them so far, thanks so much for supporting the show, and this Scrappy side project.
I’ve loved making this show, but without folks like you listening and saying nice things about it, I can’t imagine I would have stuck with it this long, so truly, thank you so much.
Okay, that’s all for now. I’ve gotta pack. This is the last episode of 2024, so I will see you back here in a month when 2025 with more Opinion Science.
