EA - Radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups by James Ozden

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups, published by James Ozden on December 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note: This post is a synthesised version of this report, which analyses some public opinion polling we did for a disruptive climate-focused campaign in the UK, by Just Stop Oil. I think this might be relevant to EAs as I've generally perceived there to be quite a lot of skepticism about groups who employ "radical" tactics (e.g. disruptive protest) as it might taint a certain field, or otherwise slow overall progress. Whilst this work only answers the public opinion component of this concern, we find that radical tactics can actually increase support for and identification with more moderate organisations working on the same issue - a helpful dynamic. However, it's plausible that this works best for large social movements (e.g. the climate movement) where distinctions between a radical faction and moderate faction are much more clear. That said, we also found some trends towards polarisation that we intend to analyse further.SummarySocial Change Lab conducted nationally representative YouGov surveys, before and after a week-long campaign by Just Stop Oil to block the M25 motorway. These surveys were conducted longitudinally, by surveying the same people before and after the Just Stop Oil M25 campaign. Our aim was to see if a ‘radical flank effect’ was at play: did the radical tactics implemented by Just Stop Oil impact attitudes towards more moderate UK climate organisations? We surveyed 1,415 members of the public about their support for climate policies and support for and identification with a more moderate climate organisation (Friends of the Earth). We detected a positive radical flank effect, whereby increased awareness of Just Stop Oil resulted in increased support for and identification with Friends of the Earth (p=0.004 and p=0.007 respectively).We believe this is the first time the radical flank effect has been observed empirically using large-scale nationally representative polling, and it corroborates previous experimental findings by Simpson et al. (2022). The results indicate the potential positive effects of radical tactics on a broader social movement.Support for climate policies also increased between our two surveys, though we attribute this largely to media coverage of COP27, which took place at the same time as the M25 protests. We believe this change was largely due to COP27 as we observed no positive correlation between awareness of Just Stop Oil and support for climate policies, and in fact, observed a statistically non-significant (p = 0.19) negative association.Key Results:Over 92% of UK adults had heard of Just Stop Oil after their campaign, putting awareness of the organisation as high as the top 20 UK charities. This figure was 87% before this campaign started (as people may have reported higher awareness of Just Stop Oil purely due to our first survey).The number of people saying they support Friends of the Earth increased from 50.3% to 52.9% of the population, a 2.6 percentage point increase, equivalent to 1.75 million people in the UK.A clear positive radical flank effect: Increased awareness of Just Stop Oil after their M25 protest campaign was linked with stronger identification with and support for Friends of the Earth.A trend towards polarisation: Increased awareness of Just Stop Oil through their M25 campaign tended to make people who had low baseline identification with a moderate climate organisation reduce their support for climate policies; the opposite was true for people with high levels of baseline identification, who showed increased support for climate policies with increasing awareness of Just Stop Oil.IntroductionSocial movements are often made up of several factions, dep...