A unique motivational profile for activists? Towards a more comprehensive social identity model of collective action

Abstract

Social protest is often enacted by activists and sympathizers of political causes, but are both groups motivated by the same psychological factors? The extended Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) entails that group identification, anger, and efficacy uniquely predict individuals’ collective action, with moral conviction amplifying these other motivations. We propose that SIMCA may work well for sympathizers of political causes, but lacks two key predictors that rely on previous participation, which should hence be relatively unique to activists. We developed a more comprehensive SIMCA that adds empowerment and embeddedness for activists and evaluated this model in three studies among American social justice activists at different stages of the Black Lives Matter movement, and among Jewish-Israeli anti-occupation activists. Our findings confirmed the extended SIMCA for sympathizers, and largely supported the need for extending it for activists, demonstrating the added predictive value of embeddedness and empowerment.