A protest can be a fine way to get people’s attention—particularly the attention of those in positions of power. But one of the most important, and most overlooked, functions of protest is to prevent the dreaded “spiral of silence,” which can begin when people wrongly believe that their own point of view is not widely shared.
When political speech is considered socially sensitive or politically dangerous, people are more likely to sit out protests, mute themselves online, and keep quiet in everyday conversation. These small acts of silencing may seem merely polite or indifferent, but they can easily spiral.
People sometimes take as many cues from silence as they do from noise. And because people interpret silence to mean quiet acceptance or approval of the status quo, they use it to inform their own decisions about whether to speak out. Silence begets silence, which begets further misunderstanding about what a society actually collectively believes or wants.
Political and psychological scientists like me who study this phenomenon have found that a “spiral of silence” is one way that unpopular policies and regimes persist. One major reason is a muted, acquiescent public—the proverbial people watching the naked emperor’s parade.
Recent psychological research on public opinion regarding climate change has shown how wrong Americans can be about one another’s beliefs. For example: What percentage of Americans is at least somewhat concerned about climate change? Recently, a representative group of more than 6,000 Americans answered this question. On average, they guessed that less than half of Americans—only 43 percent—worry about climate change. In their eyes, a clear majority of Americans is unconcerned. This is not true, however. In actuality, 66 percent of Americans report worrying about climate change.
This massive underestimate also extends to Americans’ perceptions of support for various climate policies aimed at slowing climate change. The survey, fielded by an interuniversity team of psychologists led by the psychologist Gregg Sparkman, asked people to estimate the amount of support among Americans for a carbon tax, mandates that electricity be generated by renewable energy, wind and solar infrastructure on public lands, and support for the Green New Deal. Average guesses for support of these policies ranged from 37 to 43 percent. In reality, 66 to 80 percent of Americans support these policies. The researchers noted in their findings that supporters of climate policies “outnumber opponents two to one, while Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true.” Americans are living in a “false social reality,” they concluded, when it comes to climate-change opinions.
By now, we all know something about reality’s tenuousness—we’re bombarded with information but very frequently left grasping to figure out what is actually true. Layer on uncertainty about what others believe, and you’ll find yourself in a “false social reality” where you conclude that you are in the minority of people who care about a given issue. Such a misperception can make you lose hope for solutions, or discourage you from speaking up or acting. In the case of climate change, Americans also lose hope because they believe that opposition to climate policy is based on hostile partisan polarization. But hostile partisan polarization on this issue also turns out to be larger in perception than in reality.
In another study, this one by the psychologists David Sherman and Leif Van Boven, participants guessed that Americans would support two climate policies—cap-and-trade and revenue-neutral carbon policy—if their own party proposed them, but not if they were proposed by the other party. This is a reasonable assumption in a highly polarized society. But for Democrats, this was incorrect—Democratic participants reported support for the climate policies whether they were proposed by a Democratic or a Republican lawmaker. Republican participants were unsupportive of climate policies if they were proposed by a Democrat, but Democratic participants overestimated their opposition, which was closer to “no support” than “active opposition.”
The fact that organized protest can break the spiral of silence, and correct our impressions of what other Americans think, is one of the most immediate and important values of protesting in the first place. My own research and the research of other social scientists have repeatedly documented instances from recent American history in which protest updated our impressions of what other citizens believe.
For example, about three years ago, on June 24, 2022, protests broke out after the Supreme Court ruled, in Dobbs v. Jackson, that the federal government should not guarantee a right to legal access to abortion, overturning the precedent set by Roe v. Wade 50 years prior. A group of my colleagues and I, led by Chelsey Clark, had already been surveying Americans regarding their personal beliefs about abortion (Do you support legal access to abortion?) and other Americans’ beliefs (How many Americans do you think support access to abortion?). We found that following the Supreme Court decision, Americans’ beliefs about abortion barely budged, but their perceptions of other Americans’ beliefs were different. Despite the fact that the Court had just ruled against legal access to abortion, Americans were more likely to perceive that other Americans supported legal access.
What caused people to update their impressions of what Americans believe? In my research, we connected this change to their exposure to protest and dissent. Social media and traditional media were filled with images of people marching against the ruling. Analyzing millions of Twitter impressions and tweets, we found that the sentiment of tweets about the ruling were much more negative than positive. It also helped that more than 4 million of the tweets shared links to polling data indicating that a majority of Americans supported legalized abortion access, a fact that journalistic institutions also reported widely at the time.
Scholars of the Supreme Court have theorized that Court rulings can change public opinion, and even our impressions of what other Americans think. In fact, in our own prior work, led by Margaret Tankard, we studied the public-opinion impact of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage. Across the partisan divide and among older and younger men and women, our survey respondents did not change their own beliefs about same-sex marriage. However, their perceptions of other Americans’ beliefs changed: In the days and months following the ruling, they perceived that other Americans had increased their approval of same-sex marriage. This shift in their perception of other Americans was big—as big as the actual shift in personal opinions approving of same-sex marriage over the past 15 years among Baby Boomers.
You might recall that in the days following the ruling, there was another kind of American demonstration. Or, at least, you might remember the rainbows. Americans’ social-media feeds lit up in rainbows; Google posted a rainbow banner across its search page; and at night, the White House was bathed in rainbow lights. There was a great deal of media coverage of weddings (which also featured rainbows). Long-time couples rushed to courthouses and city halls, and local news was full of videos and pictures of happy couples crying and holding hands. The celebrations were hard to miss.
In both cases, Americans heard about the Supreme Court ruling, and then looked around at the people in the streets, on their televisions, and on social media. After Obergefell v. Hodges, people observed the immediate, widespread celebrations and perceived more support for same-sex marriage than they had before the ruling. After Dobbs v. Jackson, Americans again looked around at their social world and inferred from the widespread protest, discontent, and polling evidence shared on Twitter that Americans were more supportive of legal access to abortion than they’d previously thought.
Neither of these studies assessed whether Americans’ perception had updated to a perfectly accurate view of public opinion—we did not ask participants to estimate the percentage of supporters for either issue. Rather, these studies imply that Americans’ perceptions of public opinion changed in the direction of the public demonstrations, not in the direction of the Court rulings. Another recent data collection—by me and my colleagues—reinforces this point. After the Supreme Court ruled in two cases—Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina—against the use of race-based affirmative action in higher education, there was very little public protest. We found that survey participants again updated their perceptions of what Americans think about affirmative action—immediately after the ruling, they thought that Americans supported it less. In this case, the Court ruling was accompanied by relative silence. People take cues from silence.
Michael Suk-Young Chwe is a political scientist who studies how public rallies, demonstrations, and parades can all be used to build “common knowledge”—not just a shared understanding of what is true but an awareness of both other people’s opinions and the fact that those people know our opinions. Because rallies and demonstrations are a form of “symbolic resistance,” they can be underestimated, Chwe acknowledges. But they build our common knowledge, because we are all observing one another watch the spectacle.
There is a class of people who do not underestimate symbolic gatherings in public: those who wish to seize and retain power. Evidence for this point stretches back to the Tudor kings and queens of 16th-century England, who paraded to various locations outside their court to be seen by their subjects. Although anthropologists have analyzed these local processions (or “progresses,” to use the term favored by historians) as direct acts of power in which monarchs such as Queen Elizabeth I marked each outlying territory as belonging to the Crown. Chwe points out that the underappreciated value of these parades were the “crowds of astonished peasants.” The audiences that gathered were not just watching the Queen—they were watching other people watch the Queen.
American leaders also believe in common knowledge. Many Americans can still recall President Richard Nixon’s famous 1969 speech asserting that a “silent majority” supported his Vietnam War policy, in contrast to the loud minority showing up to anti-war protests. President Barack Obama, in his 2009 speech presenting his health-care plan to a joint session of Congress, reminded the public that “a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option.” Today, President Donald Trump reflexively advertises and exaggerates the size of the crowds at his rallies and inaugurations, and introduces rumors with the phrase many people are saying. In advance of his Washington, D.C., military parade, which coincided with the nationwide “No Kings Day” protests, Trump claimed that he “hadn’t heard of any protests,” but threatened a “very heavy response” to any protesters at his parade.
Of course, not all types of protests cause the public to update their impressions of public opinion in the direction of their cause. Violent protests, or media coverage that falsely frames protests as violent when they are not, can lead the public to view protesters as representatives of fringe or extremist viewpoints. As the political scientist Omar Wasow finds in the context of the civil-rights movement, protester-initiated violence can backfire in subsequent elections. It is for this reason that elites who are being challenged through protest often seek to frame protesters as violent or, Nixon-like, as part of a “vocal minority.” The challenge for protest organizers is to present a large, peaceful show of opinion that is not easily reframed or misrepresented by elites or by the echo chambers of social and partisan mass media.
In his book Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge, Chwe quotes the renowned social theorist Jürgen Habermas: “The fundamental phenomenon of power is not the instrumentalization of another’s will, but the formation of a common will.” What do other Americans believe? To know, we look around for a public signal.
Politics is a challenge for human coordination. People want to participate in political action only if others do as well. Those who believe in self-governance must signal to other people that they wish to participate, that they believe in one form of politics or another. We must watch one another—not just through social media or a news channel—to learn what we believe. And we must be willing to speak up ourselves. This is the way to form common knowledge about what other Americans truly think and want. And this is the underappreciated value of protests. To paraphrase the political scientist Diana Mutz: they don’t tell us what to think, but they tell us what other people think.
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