In their new book, Changing Minds: Social Movements’ Cultural Impacts (Russell Sage Foundation), UC Irvine sociologists Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta explore how movements shape culture beyond policy wins. From shifting public attitudes to influencing corporate behavior, they reveal the lasting cultural legacies of activism. Below, Polletta and Amenta discuss the challenges of tracing movements’ cultural effects, surprising insights from their research, and the strategies today’s activists can use to pave the way for change.

Q: Changing Minds focuses on how social movements shape culture beyond just policy changes. What inspired you to explore this dimension of activism, and why do you think it’s been understudied?

A: It’s funny: scholars have always known that social movements’ most important impacts are often cultural ones. Movements change what we believe and value and the way we live and work. They create groups - “taxpayers,” “senior citizens,” “the disabled”- that mean something long after the movement is over. The problem has been how to explain those impacts. It’s difficult to tell how much of a shift in people’s attitudes owes to the impact of a social movement rather than to other things that were happening at the same time. For example, in the wake of the 1970s women’s movement, Americans came to see women as entitled to the kinds of careers that men had. But was that new view due to the movement? Or did it reflect longer-term trends of women entering the work force, marrying later, and having the smaller families that allowed them to imagine working on a longer time horizon? Even identifying movements’ impacts is hard. Opinion polls about a movement’s issue, for example, often don’t exist when a movement is getting off the ground, and even after pollsters begin to ask questions about a movement’s issue, the results are notoriously hard to interpret. Still, we decided in the end that the difficulties in grasping movements’ influence shouldn’t stop us from at least trying!

Q: Your research spans a broad range of movements, from old-age pensions to the civil rights movement to the present-day environmental movement. Were there any surprising commonalities or key differences in how these movements influenced cultural change?

A: Even the most popular grassroots movements involve only a fraction of the population. People learn about movements and what they are fighting for from the media. And whether the movement comes off as worthy, as dangerous, or as plain silly matters to the way the issues it is mobilizing around - whether racial justice, climate change, gun rights, or abortion - get taken up in public discussion. Activists have nowhere near as much control as they would like over how journalists represent them, but actions that make them seem serious political players tend to win favorable coverage - whereas becoming the targets of investigation tends to be worse than no news coverage at all. Once Black Panther Party members were on trial for an alleged bombing conspiracy, for instance, their demands for police reform disappeared from the news; the focus was all on the trial. The movements that we studied, moreover, benefited from a cascade of coverage not just in the news, but also in political commentary, on dramatic and comedic television, on talk shows, in popular books and movies, and so on. We don’t commonly think of fictional television as political, for example, but we probably would not have rights to same-sex marriage in this country - marriage equality - if popular television shows had not made many Americans comfortable with gay and lesbian characters, and by extension, real people. In other words, activists have had good reason to set up offices in Hollywood as well as Washington. 

But getting attention is only the first step. The second is to get the movement’s message acted on. Occasionally, people learn about a movement and decide on their own to change their behavior in line with it: they stop eating meat, say, after learning about the animal rights movement. But we are much more likely to make behavioral changes when people around us are doing so. So imagine that our school, employer, or church adopts movement-friendly practices - no longer serving meat in the cafeteria, perhaps. An action like that, which is not required by law, has the potential to influence a lot of people. When is it likely to happen? When do for-profit companies, say, adopt the practices that movements want but that will cost them money? Sometimes, companies are led by people who truly believe in the cause. But more commonly, they see other high-profile companies changing and they worry that being left behind may harm their reputation with clients, investors, insurers, and others. Movements can set that process of imitation in motion. For example, a study of the conference calls that companies routinely make to their investors and financial analysts showed that after Black Lives Matter mobilizations around George Floyd’s murder, many companies’ calls focused on issues of race and inequality. When senior management on these calls announced plans to appoint a Black director, create a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department, or donate to racial justice programs, the market reacted favorably, and the company’s stock valuation increased. Executives who made vague commitments saw their firms’ stock valuation go down. Environmental activists, to give another example, worked to convince universities that investing in wind energy would enhance their reputations. Activists, in other words, capitalized on organizations’ tendency to imitate those seen as leaders in the field by helping to define leadership as taking a stand on the movement’s issue.

Q: You highlight the role of popular culture in amplifying movement messages. Can you share an example where a movement’s message was reshaped in ways that either helped or hindered its goals?

A: When it comes to policy, it’s easy to grasp that movements rarely get all of what they want. Usually, the compromise activists win is better than nothing, but sometimes it’s even worse.  We argue the same thing about culture. New cultural understandings - of what racial justice looks like or how we can save the planet - are also compromises between activists and groups with more power. What that means is that ideas and practices we commonly credit to a movement may not be what the movement intended or wanted. Take recycling. The fact that most Americans recycle today is seen as a victory for the environmental movement. But the initial push for recycling came from the soft drink and beverage bottling industries. Beginning in the 1950s, at a time when Americans were becoming concerned about litter, states considered, and in some cases passed, laws requiring beverage companies to use reusable containers. To fend off those laws, soft drink and bottling companies set out to convince Americans that litter was their fault. Americans needed to be motivated to pick up, dispose of, and later, recycle their waste. Consumers, not companies, should be responsible for solving the problem. The companies won. Years later, it seems strange to think that Americans once routinely paid forty percent of bottled drink’s price as a deposit to be returned when they returned the bottle. And we continue to accept the idea that it is consumers who stand in the way of environmental sustainability rather than producers. When fossil fuel companies encourage us to monitor our personal carbon footprint, they promote that common sense: that we and not they are responsible for solving the problem of climate change.

Q: Your book suggests that certain strategies make movements more likely to achieve cultural impact. What are some of the most effective tactics for activists today looking to change public attitudes?

A: Activists should still try to change laws and policies. But they should also try to get people talking about their issue in as many settings as possible. They should work to get their perspective into news commentary, their leaders and members invited onto talk shows, their contact information included in blog posts and podcasts, their hashtags picked up on social media. They should supply journalists with the “ordinary” person affected by the issue (since research shows that “person on the street” opinions are often more influential than those of experts). They should convince TV producers that their issue will make a buzzworthy storyline (since research shows that fictional stories can sometimes change people’s minds better than factual information). Activists should look for cultural figures whom the public trusts - even in our polarized political society. A recent study showed that when television weatherpeople talked about the effects of climate change as part of their forecasts, their viewers began to seek out information about climate change. To get the movement’s message acted on, activists should target decision makers in businesses and in nonprofit organizations like universities and churches as well as the government. Activists should try to convince organizational leaders not only that acting to support the movement is morally right, but also that doing so will put the organization on the cutting edge among its peers, gaining it positive publicity and, sometimes, profit.