The backlash paradox of radical climate protests

By Rob | August 30, 2025 |

Extreme actions turn people off the activists behind them—but may leave the broader climate movement stronger than before.

Fig. 2. The mediated relationship between protest extremity and movement support (Study 1). Note. Protest extremity: −1 = moderate, 1 = extreme. Target deservingness: −1 = undeserving, 1 = deserving. Values presented on the diagram are unstandardized betas. ∗p < .05, ∗∗∗p < .001.

By Sarah DeWeerdt in Anthropocene

August 26, 2025

Groups that carry out extreme climate protests risk creating antipathy to themselves, but may increase concern about climate change more broadly, according to a new study. The findings add an empirical angle to the debate over disruptive tactics such as climate activists gluing themselves to property, throwing soup on paintings, or blocking bridges and roads that have emerged in recent years.

“We uncovered what we call the ‘climate activist’s dilemma,’” says study team member Jarren Nylund, a graduate student in social and environmental psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia.

“Disruptive climate protests may help raise awareness and motivate some people to act, but they can also alienate the public from the activists themselves,” he explains. “Importantly, we found no evidence that these tactics reduce support for the wider climate movement or the broader cause of climate action.”

Nylund and his colleagues conducted two studies. One included 178 Australian psychology students, and the other a politically representative sample of 511 people in the UK. In both studies, participants gave their impressions after reading descriptions of climate protests that varied in terms of protest tactics and targets.

The protests employed either moderate tactics (a peaceful rally in which protesters held placards) or extreme ones (activists blockaded property and defaced it with spray paint). They targeted either the headquarters of a fossil fuel corporation or a shopping center or department store open to the general public.

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In both studies, participants perceived climate activists who engaged in disruptive protests as more immoral than those involved in moderate protests, the researchers report in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. They also felt less emotional connection and identification with extreme protestors, and said they had less support for the activist group.

Studies of other social movements have pointed to an “activist’s dilemma” whereby moderate protests struggle to capture public attention, while extreme protests garner negative attention – and wind up eroding support for the movement. But this dynamic seems to operate a bit differently in the case of climate change, the researchers found.

The second experiment revealed these nuances with more extensive, detailed questions about participants’ views of the protesting groups, the broader climate movement, and climate change in general. In this experiment, the extreme protests increased people’s concern about climate change and their intention to take action compared to the moderate protests.

“One thing that surprised me was that, unlike previous studies of extreme protest in other social movement contexts, we didn’t see a reduction in support for the broader climate cause,” Nylund says. “Instead, the decline in support was directed specifically at the activists using the disruptive tactics, not climate action itself.”

That is, people distinguished between the group doing the protest and the climate movement as a whole. A disruptive protest might spark backlash against the group involved, yet still increase support for climate action in the end.

“The public may see a clearer distinction between climate activists and the broader fight against climate change than in some other social movements, so negative views of climate protesters don’t necessarily spill over into opposition to the cause,” Nylund says. “It could also be that climate change has become such a widely recognized and urgent issue that people’s support for action is more resilient, even when they dislike how it’s being protested.”

The researchers expected that study participants would judge the protestors and their actions differently depending on whether protests targeted fossil fuel companies or the general public. But this wasn’t the case. “Participants may have seen both [fossil fuel company] employees and shoppers as fairly ordinary people, neither especially culpable nor blameless,” Nylund says. Or, they may not have seen the fossil fuel company as being particularly responsible for climate change.

The researchers plan follow-up experiments to better test how the “deservingness” of protest targets affects how people judge the protests.

More broadly, I’m interested in moving beyond the question of whether protest tactics work to understanding what specific attributes of a protest make it more likely to achieve outcomes that contribute to meaningful social change,” says Nylund. “My hope is that this line of research can equip organizers with clearer, evidence-based guidance for designing protest actions strategically.”

Source: Nylund J.L. et al. “The climate activist’s dilemma: Extreme protests reduce movement support but raise climate concern and intentions.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2025.

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