action before belief

Last night I started reading Ziad Munson’s new book, The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works, and it turns out to be a really, really interesting treatment of the processes that lead people to get involved in social movements.  The key question motivating the book is, do people join movements because they believe in the cause or do they believe in the cause because they joined the movement? On its face, it seems like the answer would be straightforward – beliefs must precede involvement; why else, if not for beliefs and values, would anyone sacrifice their time and resources to a cause? This is the conventional wisdom of many social movement studies (e.g., recently Klandermans but going all the way back to Tocqueville). But Munson discovers through in-depth qualitative analyses of pro-life activists that this conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold true. Many activists alter their beliefs as the result of participating in a movement. Here is Munson’s summary:

The link between beliefs and action must be turned on its head: real action often precedes meaningful beliefs about an issue. Demographic and attitudinal differences between activists and nonactivists cannot explain why some people join the pro-life movement and others do not. Instead, mobilization occurs when people are drawn into activism through organizational and relational ties, not when they form strong beliefs about abortion. Beliefs about abortion are often underdeveloped, incoherent, and inconsistent until individuals become actively engaged with the movement. The “process of conviction” (Maxwell 2002) is the result of mobilization, not a necessary prerequisite for it (pg. 20).

People join causes little-by-little, at first perhaps through small events because they have friends in the cause or perhaps just out of curiosity about the organization. Participation changes the way you think about the issues and causes you to reconsider your beliefs. From a psychological standpoint, this makes a lot of sense (see cognitive dissonance). From a practical perspective this also makes a lot of sense. Many organizations purposefully seek to alter the beliefs and values of their participants (hello, organized religion!), and so we should be surprised if people who joined a social movement didn’t adjust their beliefs to fit the movement’s values. Munson shows that people regularly join movements without being sure what they really believe about the movement’s issue. It’s not that they join the pro-life movement with a strong pro-choice agenda. They’re just not sure what they think or how they feel about the cause. The movement refines a person’s value system until they become true believers (or drop out).

The study has implications for the way we think about organizational selection processes at the individual level. Selection, especially among organizations with a social mission, are greatly affected by personal relationships and the recruiting capacities of the organization. Belief can follow.