Understanding the impact of anger-evoking and efficacy-eliciting tweets in White support for the BLM movement

Abstract

Waning support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement among White Americans motivated two experiments to identify the potential of social media messages for political engagement. Scholarship on the social psychology of collective action provided theoretical grounding for investigating how people respond to information about social injustice committed against a trait group they do not belong to. The experiments explored the potential of tweets about Black Lives Matter protests to elicit collective action among Caucasians. A between-subjects experiment with 4 conditions (low activation, anger-evoking, efficacy-eliciting, and co-activation) was employed with collective action intent as the dependent variable. Findings show that social media messages (tweets) that elicit anger and efficacy states influenced collective action intent among White people in support of the BLM movement. Importantly, this study shows that anger and efficacy states follow two distinct pathways to political engagement as a result of tweet content.