Collective Action Motivation

What could motivate you to take part in collective action? Would your answer be the same today as ten years ago? If you think that this is because the world situation has changed, you might be wrong. As research shows, people tend to be naïve realists about what causes their behaviour. For example, people do not always take self-change into account when rendering judgments of world change, and that even when they do, they often do not correct for self-change adequately (Eibach, Libby, & Gilovich, 2003). Thus, it might be the change in you and your beliefs that would motivate you to take part in collective action at one, but not the other, point of your life. Yet, the question is under which conditions you are more likely to join collective

However, to our knowledge, there is no research investigating the effect of potential injustice on one’s willingness to engage in collective action. The question is whether people would be motivated to engage in collective action if they believe there is a possibility of injustice in the future in case no actions would be done. This matters especially if we think about collective action to protect the existing achievements of the group. If people can imagine that the current status of their ingroup is under the threat, it might motivate them to engage in collective action. Thus, the perception of the stability of existing achievements may influence one’s willingness to engage in collective action. That is, people’s beliefs about the social progress may be an important factor, which is missing in the SIMCA

That might influence their attitudes towards the collective action. Lay theories are naïve implicit theories about the world that people use to make sense of their everyday lives (reference?). One of the examples of the lay theories includes theories about willpower, which affect ability to self-regulate (Job, Dweck, & Walton, 2010; Job, Bernecker, & Dweck, 2015). People may have two kinds of the theories of self-regulation: limited and non-limited (Job et al., 2010). Those with a limited theory believe that self-control resources are depletable, while those with non-limited theory believe otherwise. This belied influences our productivity, as people with a non-limited theory of self-control have a better ability to self-regulate than people with a limited theory. Another example of the lay theories is the perceptions of self as either flexible or stable. This perception could hugely affect our wellbeing. Those who perceive themselves as having a stable, non-flexible identity, have lower well-being levels when conflicted identities are activated (Rabinovich & Morton, 2016). Overall, previous work demonstrates that lay theories that seem abstract at the first look could have important implications for our everyday