Turning Problems into Potential: Positive Social Movement Dynamics

Posted on July 24, 2025 By Rachel MacNair

by Rachel M. MacNair

There are several features of social movements commonly seen as problems. Yet when underlying psychological dynamics are understood, they can be explained and accommodated. At times, they can even be converted to positive developments.

So Many Problems We Have

One such feature is a perception that one’s own movement has a distressing number of problems, while the movement’s opposition is seen as running smoothly. Yet the opposition, similar to one’s own group, is not likely to publicize its personality clashes, territorial squabbles, financial difficulties, and insufficient volunteers.

This is something of a variant of the “out-group homogeneity effect.” In this case, it is an out-group unseen-problem effect.

The in-group is the group a person belongs to and identifies with. The out-group is a group a person considers to be other people. People can easily see the differences between individuals in their own in-group; for instance, one person is shy, another obnoxious, one is punctual but not trustworthy, and so on. There is a tendency for these understandings of individual differences to drop when a person looks at an out-group. The less known the out-group is, the greater the “out-group homogeneity effect.” People in an out-group are distant, so differences get blurred. The more distant the group, the greater the blurring. This is where the idea comes from, in referring to another racial group, that “they all look alike.”

The resulting deindividuation can easily become dehumanization. One of the things a nonviolent campaign seeks to do, whether aware of this mechanism or not, is to reduce the out-group homogeneity effect by reducing the sense of its group as an out-group in the minds of its opponents.

Those in power tend to see opposition forces as being a mass of people rather than a set of individuals. They are fully aware that the people they deal with in their own group are individuals, but a group of people protesting them tends to be stereotyped as being homogeneous. If those people use violence, the distance is maintained and the out-group retains its status all the more. Efforts at humanizing interaction break down those stereotypes; the out-group homogeneity effect lessens as the distance between groups erodes.

This works both ways. People who want to start nonviolent campaigns against those in power may also tend to see these people as more similar to each other than they are. Demonizing the opposition and viewing them as homogeneous are strong psychological tendencies in a conflict. Paying attention to ways of having human interaction with people from this out-group will result in a fading of the bias to see them as similar, when the reality of their individual differences becomes clear.

Meanwhile, being aware that the opposition to any social movement isn’t a monolith but actually has many of the same problems we do is simply a matter of being in touch with reality. Movements are made up of people. People have problems.

Divisions

Another common feature is a diversity of perspectives seen as distressing divisiveness. Many of these differences are so common they can be categorized as present in most large social movements.

The solution is to understand them not as divisions, but as multiplications – “schools of thought” that constitute complementary perspectives. Varied schools of thought can achieve more than any one school by itself would.

For example, “purists” believe compromise is immoral, while “pragmatists” believe it’s necessary. When both are active, the purists keep the compromises from being overly watered down. The pragmatists can use the purists to make themselves appear more moderate and therefore more effective in legislative settings.

As another example, people who believe in digging out “root causes” will dive more deeply, but those who instead believe in “reform for now” can alleviate current suffering and make progress. Both approaches are necessary.

Newcomers provide much needed energy and avoiding of ruts. Experienced people provide knowledge of what has actually worked and not worked in the past. They may at times have conflicts, but it’s long been understood that both are needed.

Keeps Getting Worse?

Yet another common problem is that there is a constant feeling that events are worsening at a time when they’re objectively improving. This causes unrealistic discouragement.

One reason is that our efforts in the real world fall short of perfection. Therefore, when perfection is the comparison being made, rather than comparing to previous conditions, disappointment is bound to result.

Another reason is that smaller problems come to the forefront when larger and more urgent problems are solved and therefore no longer overshadow them. Progress actually encourages the recognition of a larger number of problems. The contagion of successful social justice movements in one area encourages people to think in terms of social justice and rights in a wide array of other areas.

Yet another reason is that advocates tend to push how very bad things are with the idea that people will be pushed to action the more they think that things are awful. They don’t take into account how that very negativity may discourage people – if we’ve done all this work and it’s still so terrible, then it’s futile. Why bother to work further?

Keeping in mind progress that has actually been made is important to counter these ways of thinking. It’s more in touch with reality, and it inspires more work in the future. We realize that all the work in the past has in fact made progress. Therefore, there’s solid reason to think our current work can make more progress.

The Stubborn Won’t Listen

Finally, the dynamics of cognitive dissonance gives insight on why people may be stubborn about refusing to understand how terrible a social situation is once it’s explained to them. Other understandings they hold dear may override the social-justice presentation. This idea is developed at length in my post, Explaining Belligerency.

Once activists understand how cognitive dissonance is working against them, they can turn this psychological dynamic around to make it work for them. For example, letting people know that nuclear weapons and abortion are both way less than they used to be at their peak allows people to have less trouble trying to account for why they’re good people in a good nation and yet have such violence going on.

Conclusion

Many of the problems that are common to social movements and which seem intractable can become much easier to handle when the underlying psychology is understood. This will help avoid unwarranted discouragement and make movements more effective.