Eric Shuman, Ph.D, NYU and Harvard Business School

Recent decades have been characterized by the increasing occurrence and strength of grassroots social movements and large-scale collective action by historically disadvantaged groups. Often, this collective action is met with resistance from people in advantaged groups who already hold status and power. This is why my research program aims to generate a social-psychological understanding of the effectiveness of collective action, with the particular goal of better understanding how collective action affects members of historically advantaged groups (particularly those resistant to social change). My first line of work examines how different collective action tactics can overcome resistance from these advantaged group members and motivate them to support the policy change. I initially investigated the potential effectiveness of nonnormative nonviolent action by conducting experiments and real-time surveys during social movements in 4 contexts (N = 3,650). These studies indicated that nonnormative nonviolent action was particularly effective because it was able to generate both a sense of disruption and also maintain perceptions that the protesters were well-intentioned (a process I term constructive disruption). As massive protests erupted around the United States following the death of George Floyd, I sought to leverage this context to examine similar questions at a much larger scale using observational data and large-scale surveys (N = 224,898). I found that a mix of nonviolent and violent protests increased support for BlackLivesMatter’s key policy goals among conservatives living in relatively liberal areas, indicating that these tactics may also be able to produce constructive disruption. In my second line of research, I delve more deeply into the psychological roots of resistance to social change among members of historically advantaged groups. I present a framework for understanding the psychology of historically advantaged groups, as well as measurement work validating this framework (N = 4,617) across multiple intergroup contexts, which guides my current research in this area. Through this work, I aim to better understand how collective action efforts by the disadvantaged can overcome resistance to advance social change toward greater equality.

Eric Shuman is currently a post-doctoral researcher at New York University and Harvard Business School, after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Groningen and Hebrew University. Broadly, Dr. Shuman studies the psychological processes underlying social change. More specifically, his research centers around two main topics: (1) the effects of different types of collective action on historically advantaged groups in society, (2) understanding and developing interventions to reduce the psychological roots of resistance to social change among advantaged groups. To study these topics, he integrates theory and methods from social psychology and political science, and employs a multi-method approach involving surveys, behavioral experiments, big data, and computational social science.