I’m visiting New York to attend the International Society for Justice Research biennial conference. In between amazing food, great live music, and my everlasting search for good coffee I’ll be hearing about top notch socially impactful research! My talk is at 2:10 on Saturday June 21 in the session “Overcoming obstacles to social change”, abstract below:
Feeling hopeful inspires support for social change
Hope is an emotion that has been implicated in social change efforts, yet no research has examined whether feeling hopeful actually motivates support for social change. Study 1 (N=274) confirmed that hope is associated with greater support for social change in two countries with different political contexts. Study 2 (N=165) revealed that hope predicts support for social change better than other emotions often investigated in collective action research. Study 3 (N=100) replicated this finding using a hope scale and showed the effect occurs over and above positive mood. Study 4 (N=58) demonstrated experimentally that hope motivates support for social change. In all four studies, the effect of hope was mediated by perceived efficacy to achieve social equality. This research confirms the motivating potential of hope and illustrates the power of this emotion in generating social change.
