Impact of repression threat on collective action tendencies : moderation effects of repression threat severity, politicized identification and collective action type -

Abstract

Social psychological research (Earl, 2003; Earl, 2011) has offered little quantitative empirical evidence on collective action in repressive contexts. The proposed study aimed to experimentally investigate if repression threat has a deterring effect, a radicalizing effect, or no effect on collective action tendencies and if this depends on severity of the repression threat, the type of collective action under consideration, and politicized identity. The experiment investigated the question in the context of a student versus administration conflict. Undergraduate students from the American University of Beirut were led to believe that the administration will be restricting undergraduate students’ access to Wifi, and that it will repress (or not) protests and sit-ins against this policy. The results showed a deterrence effect of repression threat on actions that were explicitly punishable, but no effect on other normative actions either immune or susceptible to punishment. Repression threat deterred a non-normative action susceptible to punishment but only among participants who were severely repressed. Politicized identification mostly predicted normative rather than non-normative action, and there was no evidence for the moderating role of politicized identification on collective action when faced with repression threat. The results suggest that in the present context, repression threat operates in a deterring fashion particularly on normative actions that are punishable, and even some non-normative actions. However, this deterrence effect is not generalizable to all actions. Furthermore, when faced with repression threat, students who have stronger politicized identities are more likely to take collective action than those with weaker politicized identities, particularly normative forms of actions.