(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
Social networks like Facebook reveal a lot about the power of recommendations by friends and family members. Scholars who study those networks note that such recommendations can have more influence on people’s behavior than, say, traditional advertising. A similar effect applies to the building of social movements: People are far more likely to join a cause if someone they know asks them to join it.
That’s a well-established finding, says Stefaan Walgrave, a professor of political science at the University of Antwerp. But until recently, most of the research on that topic has focused on the behavior of people recruited to join a movement or a protest—on the “passive” side of mobilization as opposed to the “active” side. So Walgrave and his colleague Ruud Wouters, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, decided to conduct an analysis of people who ask others to take part in protest activity.
The researchers interviewed more than 7,000 participants in 48 protest actions across seven European countries. To avoid selection bias and to obtain as random a sample as possible, they used “pointers” to pick interview subjects and a separate group of “interviewers” to interact with those subjects. The interviewers asked participants to fill out a short questionnaire.
Some of the researchers’ findings are straightforward: People who identify with a cause are more motivated to ask others to join that cause. And people who are more deeply embedded in “participation-friendly” networks tend to be more active recruiters than those who don’t belong to such networks. “Recruiters want to be successful,” Walgrave notes, and to succeed in rallying people to their cause, “they need information about potential recruits.” The more social connections they have, the more likely they are to know about (say) the political leanings of multiple potential recruits, and that knowledge increases their ability to persuade others to join a protest.
The most notable finding of the study involves the “social compatibility” effect, as Walgrave and Wouters call it. Recruiters typically direct protest invitations to people who belong to the same social group as them, because asking someone to attend a protest can imply that the inviter will attend the protest with that person. “It would be weird if my wife asked me to go to the theater with her and if I then asked a colleague at work whom I don’t know very well to join us,” Walgrave explains. Closely related to that effect is the “mirroring” effect: People who are asked to join a protest tend to ask others who have the same social profile as the person who asked them. The better you know the person who asks you to join a protest, therefore, the less likely you are to extend a protest invitation to a diverse range of people.
For that reason, a recruitment message can travel further and across more social networks if recruiters target people with whom they have weak ties. “This is highly original research, and the results are important,” says Douglas McAdam, a professor of sociology at Stanford University and an expert on social movements. “Given the larger ripple effect of weak-tie recruitment, organizers would do well to reach out to [those with whom they have] weak rather than strong ties.” Recruiters, he adds, should “encourage those weak-tie recruits to do the same.” Strong-tie recruitment, according to Walgrave and Wouters, causes “deactivation”: The mobilization of participants loses momentum because recruiters focus their efforts on a small pool of potential recruits. “Mobilization goes further and leads to many more people participating [in a protest] if you manage to mobilize outside of your circle of friends and family,” Walgrave says.
Stefaan Walgrave and Ruud Wouters, “The Missing Link in the Diffusion of Protest: Asking Others,” American Journal of Sociology, 119, 2014.
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.