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COMPUTER SCIENCE

Moralization, protest and violence

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 370–371 (2018)Cite this article

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Online communication has become integral to modern political behaviour — to the extent that events online both reflect and influence actions offline. A study uses geolocated Twitter data to argue that moralization of protests leads to violent protests and increased support for violence.

Mooijman et al. argue that a protest is more likely to become violent as the result of two conditions: (1) “the degree to which people see protest as a moral issue” and (2) when protesters believe others see the issue in moral terms. Using Twitter and experiments to study morals is important because it provides a means of testing a class of explanations that is often difficult to test. That is, the protest literature analyses participation as a result of either cost–benefit calculations or ‘emotional’ decisions. Cost–benefit calculations have been substantially tested because their concepts are clearer to operationalize, and a central question of this strand of literature is how to overcome free-riding that naturally follows if individuals are assumed to undertake a cost–benefit analysis before protesting.

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  1. School of Public Affairs, UCLA Luskin, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld

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  1. Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld
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Correspondence to Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld.

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Steinert-Threlkeld, Z.C. Moralization, protest and violence. Nat Hum Behav 2, 370–371 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0359-7

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