From thought to action: Evaluating the Role of Ruminative Thinking in Legal, Illegal, and Violent Political Protest Via System Justification

The present project focuses on 1) addressing dominant approaches to collective action and taxonomies of political protest, aiming to disentangle protest dimensions and explore retributive and moral imperative motivations to protest; and 2) examining ruminative thoughts as antecedents of protest. Studies were framed within system justification theory and the SIMCA. Protest was addressed through hypothetical scenarios, actions presented as real, and past behaviour. Studies included manipulations of protest legality and/or presenting multiple protest forms to participants. Appraisals of protest legitimacy, normativity, morality, disruptiveness, and aggressiveness were included in different studies, with findings supporting the need to separate dimensions in theory and research. Protest illegality indirectly deterred protest tendencies via appraisals of legitimacy, but not of normativity. It did not affect the perceived morality of protest, which did predict legal and illegal non-violent protest. Appraisals of aggressiveness negatively predicted violent protest independently of other appraisals, revealing a unique element in dimensions of aggressiveness and violence. Anger rumination predicted anger at politics, support for protestor violence, and the legitimisation and moralisation of violent protest. Political rumination positively predicted non-violent protest tendencies, past protesting, the moralisation of non-violent protest, and a broad range of emotions. It also negatively predicted system justification cross-sectionally and longitudinally and decreased it experimentally. System justification negatively predicted content-relevant perceptions of injustice and appraisals of protest acceptability (i.e. economic system justification delegitimising protest with an economic component). General system justification predicted higher expected group and protest efficacy-both utilitarian and retributive. Findings highlighted the influence of political and anger rumination on non-violent and violent protest respectively, expanded the system justification literature, and provided evidence for the effects of protest illegality on protest attitudes, tendencies, and support, and for the existence of retributive and moral imperative motivations to protest. Implications for academia, policymakers, and the police, are considered.