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Americans and ‘cancel culture’: where some see calls for accountability, others see censorship, punishment.

People have challenged each other’s views for much of human history . But the internet – particularly social media – has changed how, when and where these kinds of interactions occur. The number of people who can go online and call out others for their behavior or words is immense, and it’s never been easier to summon groups to join the public fray .

The phrase  “cancel culture” is said to have originated  from a relatively obscure slang term – “cancel,” referring to  breaking up with someone  – used in a 1980s song. This term was then referenced in film and television and later evolved and gained traction on social media. Over the past several years, cancel culture has become a deeply contested idea in the nation’s political discourse . There are plenty of debates over what it is and what it means, including whether it’s a way to hold people accountable, or a tactic to punish others unjustly, or a mix of both. And some argue that cancel culture doesn’t even exist .

To better understand how the U.S. public views the concept of cancel culture, Pew Research Center asked Americans in September 2020 to share – in their own words – what they think the term means and, more broadly, how they feel about the act of calling out others on social media. The survey finds a public deeply divided, including over the very meaning of the phrase.

Pew Research Center has a long history of studying the tone and nature of online discourse as well as emerging internet phenomena. This report focuses on American adults’ perceptions of cancel culture and, more generally, calling out others on social media. For this analysis, we surveyed 10,093 U.S. adults from Sept. 8 to 13, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

This essay primarily focuses on responses to three different open-ended questions and includes a number of quotations to help illustrate themes and add nuance to the survey findings. Quotations may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. Here are the  questions used for this essay , along with responses, and its  methodology .

Who’s heard of ‘cancel culture’?

As is often the case when a new term enters the collective lexicon, public awareness of the phrase “cancel culture” varies – sometimes widely – across demographic groups.

Overall, 44% of Americans say they have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase, including 22% who have heard a great deal, according to the Center’s survey of 10,093 U.S. adults, conducted Sept. 8-13, 2020. Still, an even larger share (56%) say they’ve heard nothing or not too much about it, including 38% who have heard nothing at all. (The survey was fielded before a string of recent conversations and controversies about cancel culture.)

Familiarity with the term varies with age. While 64% of adults under 30 say they have heard a great deal or fair amount about cancel culture, that share drops to 46% among those ages 30 to 49 and 34% among those 50 and older.

While discussions around cancel culture can be highly partisan, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are no more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to say they have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase (46% vs. 44%). (All references to Democrats and Republicans in this analysis include independents who lean to each party.)

When accounting for ideology, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are more likely to have heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture than their more moderate counterparts within each party. Liberal Democrats stand out as most likely to be familiar with the term.

How do Americans define ‘cancel culture’?

As part of the survey, respondents who had heard about “cancel culture” were given the chance to explain in their own words what they think the term means.

A small share who mentioned accountability in their definitions also discussed how these actions can be misplaced, ineffective or overtly cruel.

Some 14% of adults who had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture described it as a form of censorship, such as a restriction on free speech or as history being erased:

A similar share (12%) characterized cancel culture as mean-spirited attacks used to cause others harm:

Five other distinct descriptions of the term cancel culture also appeared in Americans’ responses: people canceling anyone they disagree with, consequences for those who have been challenged, an attack on traditional American values, a way to call out issues like racism or sexism, or a misrepresentation of people’s actions. About one-in-ten or fewer described the phrase in each of these ways.

There were some notable partisan and ideological differences in what the term cancel culture represents. Some 36% of conservative Republicans who had heard the term described it as actions taken to hold people accountable, compared with roughly half or more of moderate or liberal Republicans (51%), conservative or moderate Democrats (54%) and liberal Democrats (59%).

Conservative Republicans who had heard of the term were more likely than other partisan and ideological groups to see cancel culture as a form of censorship. Roughly a quarter of conservative Republicans familiar with the term (26%) described it as censorship, compared with 15% of moderate or liberal Republicans and roughly one-in-ten or fewer Democrats, regardless of ideology. Conservative Republicans aware of the phrase were also more likely than other partisan and ideological groups to define cancel culture as a way for people to cancel anyone they disagree with (15% say this) or as an attack on traditional American society (13% say this).

Click here to explore more definitions and explanations of the term cancel culture .

Does calling people out on social media represent accountability or unjust punishment?

Given that cancel culture can mean different things to different people, the survey also asked about the more general act of calling out others on social media for posting content that might be considered offensive – and whether this kind of behavior is more likely to hold people accountable or punish those who don’t deserve it.

Overall, 58% of U.S. adults say in general, calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable, while 38% say it is more likely to punish people who don’t deserve it. But views differ sharply by party. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say that, in general, calling people out on social media for posting offensive content holds them accountable (75% vs. 39%). Conversely, 56% of Republicans – but just 22% of Democrats – believe this type of action generally punishes people who don’t deserve it.

Within each party, there are some modest differences by education level in these views. Specifically, Republicans who have a high school diploma or less education (43%) are slightly more likely than Republicans with some college (36%) or at least a bachelor’s degree (37%) to say calling people out for potentially offensive posts is holding people accountable for their actions. The reverse is true among Democrats: Those with a bachelor’s degree or more education are somewhat more likely than those with a high school diploma or less education to say calling out others is a form of accountability (78% vs. 70%).

Among Democrats, roughly three-quarters of those under 50 (73%) as well as those ages 50 and older (76%) say calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable for their actions. At the same time, majorities of both younger and older Republicans say this action is more likely to punish people who didn’t deserve it (58% and 55%, respectively).

People on both sides of the issue had an opportunity to explain why they see calling out others on social media for potentially offensive content as more likely to be either a form of accountability or punishment. We then coded these answers and grouped them into broad areas to frame the key topics of debates.

Initial coding schemes for each question were derived from reading though the open-ended responses and identifying common themes. Using these themes, coders read each response and coded up to three themes for each response. (If a response mentioned more than three themes, the first three mentioned were coded.)

After all the responses were coded, similarities and groupings among codes both within and across the two questions about accountability and punishment became apparent. As such, answers were grouped into broad areas that framed the biggest points of disagreement between these two groups.

We identified five key areas of disagreement in respondents’ arguments for why they held their views of calling out others, broken down as follows:

• 25% of all adults address topics related to whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or are trying to be helpful
• 14% center on whether calling out others on social media is a productive behavior
• 10% focus on whether free speech or creating a comfortable environment online is more important
• 8% address the differing agendas of those who call out others
• 4% focus on whether speaking up is the best action to take if people find content offensive.

For the codes that make up each of these areas, see the Appendix .

Some 17% of Americans who say that calling out others on social media holds people accountable say it can be a teaching moment that helps people learn from their mistakes and do better in the future. Among those who say calling out others unjustly punishes them, a similar share (18%) say it’s because people are not taking the context of a person’s post or the intentions behind it into account before confronting that person.

In all, five types of arguments most commonly stand out in people’s answers. A quarter of all adults mention topics related to whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or are trying to be helpful; 14% center on whether calling out others on social media is a productive behavior or not; 10% focus on whether free speech or creating a comfortable environment online is more important; 8% address the perceived agendas of those who call out others; and 4% focus on whether speaking up is the best action to take if people find content offensive.

Are people rushing to judge or trying to be helpful?

The most common area of opposing arguments about calling out other people on social media arises from people’s differing perspectives on whether people who call out others are rushing to judge or instead trying to be helpful.

One-in-five Americans who see this type of behavior as a form of accountability point to reasons that relate to how helpful calling out others can be. For example, some explained in an open-ended question that they associate this behavior with moving toward a better society or educating others on their mistakes so they can do better in the future. Conversely, roughly a third (35%) of those who see calling out other people on social media as a form of unjust punishment cite reasons that relate to people who call out others being rash or judgmental. Some of these Americans see this kind of behavior as overreacting or unnecessarily lashing out at others without considering the context or intentions of the original poster. Others emphasize that what is considered offensive can be subjective.

Is calling out others on social media productive behavior?

The second most common source of disagreement centers on the question of whether calling out others can solve anything: 13% of those who see calling out others as a form of punishment touch on this issue in explaining their opinion, as do 16% who see it as a form of accountability. Some who see calling people out as unjust punishment say it solves nothing and can actually make things worse. Others in this group question whether social media is a viable place for any productive conversations or see these platforms and their culture as inherently problematic and sometimes toxic. Conversely, there are those who see calling out others as a way to hold people accountable for what they post or to ensure that people consider the consequences of their social media posts.

Which is more important, free speech or creating a comfortable environment online?

Pew Research Center has studied the tension between free speech and feeling safe online for years, including the increasingly partisan nature of these disputes. This debate also appears in the context of calling out content on social media. Some 12% of those who see calling people out as punishment explain – in their own words – that they are in favor of free speech on social media. By comparison, 10% of those who see it in terms of accountability believe that things said in these social spaces matter, or that people should be more considerate by thinking before posting content that may be offensive or make people uncomfortable.

What’s the agenda behind calling out others online?

Another small share of people mention the perceived agenda of those who call out other people on social media in their rationales for why calling out others is accountability or punishment. Some people who see calling out others as a form of accountability say it’s a way to expose social ills such as misinformation, racism, ignorance or hate, or a way to make people face what they say online head-on by explaining themselves. In all, 8% of Americans who see calling out others as a way to hold people accountable for their actions voice these types of arguments.

Those who see calling others out as a form of punishment, by contrast, say it reflects people canceling anyone they disagree with or forcing their views on others. Some respondents feel people are trying to marginalize White voices and history. Others in this group believe that people who call out others are being disingenuous and doing so in an attempt to make themselves look good. In total, these types of arguments were raised by 9% of people who see calling out others as punishment. 

Should people speak up if they are offended?

Arguments for why calling out others is accountability or punishment also involve a small but notable share who debate whether calling others out on social media is the best course of action for someone who finds a particular post offensive. Some 5% of people who see calling out others as punishment say those who find a post offensive should not engage with the post. Instead, they should take a different course of action, such as removing themselves from the situation by ignoring the post or blocking someone if they don’t like what that person has to say. However, 4% of those who see calling out others as a form of accountability believe it is imperative to speak up because saying nothing changes nothing.

Beyond these five main areas of contention, some Americans see shades of gray when it comes to calling out other people on social media and say it can be difficult to classify this kind of behavior as a form of either accountability or punishment. They note that there can be great variability from case to case, and that the efficacy of this approach is by no means uniform: Sometimes those who are being called out may respond with heartfelt apologies but others may erupt in anger and frustration.

Acknowledgments – Appendix – Methodology – Topline

What Americans say about cancel culture and calling out others on social media

Below, we have gathered a selection of quotes from three open-ended survey questions that address two key topics. Americans who’ve heard of the term cancel culture were asked to define what it means to them. After answering a closed-ended question about whether calling out others on social media was more likely to hold people accountable for their actions or punish people who didn’t deserve it, they were asked to explain why they held this view – that is, they were either asked why they saw it as accountability or why they saw it as punishment.

• In this analysis, “familiar with” or “aware of” the phrase cancel culture mean “have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase cancel culture.” ↩
• Quotations in this essay may have been lightly edited for grammar, spelling and clarity. ↩

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Cancel Culture Is Chaotic Good

Cancel culture may prove to be the most memorable linguistic trend of the past decade.

As the year draws to a close, it’s hard to believe it’s also the end of a very strange and tumultuous decade. Who knows what the next ten years will bring? All signs point to a continuation of the same roller coaster ride of social, political, and environmental upheaval, except we’ll probably have to get used to endless puns about hindsight being 2020. It’s a good thing a nice cosy chat about language is kind of the Snuggie of polite, anxiety-free conversation we need these days. What did happen to language during the awkward teen years of the millennium? So many things!

Most obviously, we could point to many emerging slang terms from the last ten years that left an impression, if the numerous hot takes by media commentators are anything to go by, from bae to YOLO to everything else that was on fleek and had everyone shook etc., etc. But while a lot of slang terms might be fire now (and not necessarily the dumpster kind), there’s no telling whether they have any staying power. Will “lit” become the 1870s “nanty narking” of the 2010s or “extra” the new “ enthuzimuzzy ?” As the novel impact of these terms become diluted, especially by those who are fellow-kids-ing their hearts out, they fall out of fashion, becoming less effective as a way to show where you belong.

This is nothing really new, but looking deeper, how much do these slang terms really represent what went on in the last ten years? Although the internet has been around for a while (people often forget that the web, a virtual millennial at 25, is not the same thing as the internet, born in 1969, which would totally be Gen X if it cared, which, whatever), it’s really in this decade that internet language came into its own.

There was a definite linguistic growth spurt from the real native speakers of the online world coming of age, building on successive waves of internet language . The ways we convey information now, not just through text but internet memes, emojis , gifs , short form video, and the language and meta-language we use to reference these new forms of creative communication, have all influenced mainstream language in fascinating ways. The hashtag, for example, birthed around 2007, soon became a commonplace but powerful element of online communication that not only linked information from different sources, it encapsulated what a spontaneous online community was centered around. Hashtags added nuance and meta-commentary to what was said.

But our ways of speaking have been racing ahead faster than many of us can keep up with. While language change is not a new thing , thanks to the wide-ranging network of social media, it’s different in how fast and how virally it can spread now, as well as the impact it can have on real life, as speakers take up the linguistic trends used in their groups. Gender neutral “they,” for example, has been a thing for hundreds of years, yet today, it’s far more widespread and accepted, becoming Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s word of the year .

What’s really remarkable is not just the random slang that comes and goes, but those neologisms that arose out of a desperate need, like gender neutral pronouns, that spoke to the real and urgent issues arising in society that demand a public debate and a way to talk about them. When we begin to reassess our identities, we also question where we belong and what we believe, together as a group. It’s terms like #MeToo and “woke” and even “ fake news ” that have resonance in today’s world, as a kind of call to arms, in a way that “on fleek” does not. These terms seek to open up to debate the things that were once blindly accepted and taken for granted. It’s these terms that may outlast the ephemeral slang cycle, and it’s these terms that reveal this decade’s remarkable preoccupation with self, community, belonging, beliefs, and the language that goes hand in hand with building these ties.

Often we talk about language in innocent, superficial ways, as though new ways of communicating are exactly as they appear. This simplistic idea of language as, say, listicles of intriguing new slang conceals the fact that, in our post-truth world , language has become more overtly dangerous, and this can be both bad or good. Language has always been effectively used in propaganda or advertising to persuade masses of people, only now we have a better understanding of how it does this, as it’s become much easier, through social media, to use language as an effective weapon, a means of amplifying information of all kinds, by pretty much anyone who wants to (theoretically). And when you have masses of people not legally sanctioned to criticize social behaviors, this can be a concern to some.

Judging from panic-stricken media commentary, sometimes it seems as though the one thing more frightening than a lone gunman (and it isn’t a young person responding to your well-intentioned life advice with “ok boomer” ) is a random bunch of people who have banded together in some common cause. When this common cause is being aggrieved against someone’s problematic behavior, and results in “calling out,” silencing or boycotting the problematic behavior, we now call this “cancelling” someone. And the tendency toward this kind of behavior is called “cancel culture.”

Perhaps more than anything else, cancel culture will be seen as an intrinsic part of life lived publicly in this decade, with the downfall of powerful Hollywood producers, racist and sexist comedians, white supremacists, and clueless corporations left in its wake. Cancel culture, not unlike cyberbullying, has also had its more “innocent” victims, ordinary citizens who said the unacceptable thing in a public forum. Is the destructive power of cancel culture too much?

Many perceive this phenomenon of cancelling as a very new and scary thing that young people do, so much so that they’re ready to cancel the whole thing. Even Barack Obama weighed in on it recently, cautioning young people not to be overly critical and judgmental, as though the very idea of “cancelling” must always wrong and unreasonable, regardless of what is being criticized or how problematic it may be. Obama’s negative reactions to this kind of power being wielded by a groups that are relatively powerless, as an establishment figure (no matter how benevolently he presents himself), are perhaps not unusual.

The social psychologist John Drury shows that the discourse around crowds, collectives, and people power have historically been problematic and negative, revealing the class biases and political ideologies of those commentators who describe them. Communities and crowds out of step with societal norms are often presented as something to be feared, and this is something many of us internalize. Crowds are scary. Even as we speak, there’s civil unrest, protests, demonstrations, and strikes happening all around the world , for a myriad of different reasons, in a decade that began with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests. These movements have not often been described in flattering terms.

The kind of language that’s used to talk about groups of people assembled together—or their collective actions seeking to change the status quo—often maligns communities as irrational, “mobs” or “rioters” with uncontrolled, invalid emotions, a kind of faceless contagion that presents a threat to civilized, law-abiding society and the ruling establishment. As Drury points out, this language systematically delegitimizes the aims of these collectives as being trivial, if not dangerous:

If the crowd is pathologized and criminalized, then its behaviour is not meaningful. There can therefore be no rational dialogue with it. Since the crowd is not part of the democratic process, it is legitimate and even necessary to suppress it with the full force of the state.

No one could argue that it’s pleasant to be at the bottom of a pile on, virtual or not. It’s true that people can band together for the wrong reasons, but, funnily enough, they can also band together for very good reasons. Cancelling someone, in terms of public shaming, or shunning, or just being criticized, is, again, nothing new, though it is arguably different in how quickly and severely it can happen online. The English professor Jodie Nicotra points out that such a thing has always been a part of community life and, in fact, a part of building and maintaining a community’s values. Whenever people have deviated from the norm, there have been public acts of shaming, from the scarlet letters or village stocks of Puritan life to the ritual public head shavings of thousands of French women who were suspected of fraternizing with German soldiers in World War II.

Cancel culture is, on the one hand, less severe than these acts of public shaming, because it is mostly linguistic and communicative. On the other hand, it can seem more extreme, because unlike these historical events of past shaming, it’s unconstrained by geographical space and can involve large numbers of people in what can become an unrelenting personal attack. And that certainly can have unintended repercussions. Because social media, especially Twitter, is loosely joined together by a network of weak ties , it actually makes it easier for new, especially negative information, such as rumors or criticisms or even fake news, to spread quickly. It’s not constrained by closely linked social circles where information eventually stops spreading after repeatedly being shared by multiple people.

This could explain why cancel culture seems so widespread, so virulently uncontrollable, and so dangerously unstable. It’s this that makes cancel culture very much a part of modern life. Rhetorical phenomena like virtual call-outs can spontaneously self-assemble a community based on #sharedbeliefs where there may not have been one before, tapping into a power that members of a group individually may never have had, but also reinforcing its evolving norms and values through language.

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Nicotra suggests that virtual public shaming is a kind of “epideictic performance” in this way, an Aristotlean rhetorical act of blame or praise. Though we tend to focus on the negative of cancelling, we forget that there may be a good side—not just praise or approval, but the fact that injustices that were once allowed to thrive can now be revealed and acted upon by a group, and that group is made all the stronger by doing so. For example, if the group refuses to let a racist or sexist comment pass unchallenged, that reinforces its non-negotiable values and the group’s reason for being. The act of engaging in calling out problematic behaviors is the very thing that builds the bonds of a community, as members can agree or disagree with certain values or what counts as acceptable, express a joint disgust at certain behaviors, and use language developed by the collective to evolve a public morality and ethic to live by. Public call outs may not be always what a community wants to hear. It’s certainly not nice, but it’s what needs to be said for the same values to be debated, formed, shared, and upheld by everyone who belongs to the group.

As language can be dangerous, and as crowd movements can be destructive, so can the cancel culture of “internet mobs” be damaging in the wrong contexts. So while it can be problematic, certainly very messy, and even judgmental, it’s cancel culture that also gives power to minority groups that historically have not had the luxury of speaking out. We need to understand that it can be powerfully misused, but can also shine a light on severe injustices that have been accepted for so long. Time will tell how this newly acquired power will work, but rather than simply discount cancel culture as yet another misguided millennial invention, it’s good to be aware that it’s always been a necessary part of our lives. It can often do as much good as it does harm.

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Cancel Culture

A Critical Analysis

School of Media Arts and Studies, Ohio University, Athens, USA

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Provides an analytical framework for theorizing cancel culture and related phenomena in digital and non-digital spaces

Avoids assigning cancel culture to any particular political persuasion, or assessment on the basis of political position

Discusses cancel culture as a phenomenon arising at a particular juncture of cultural and political developments

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

Front matter, introduction, cancel culture, popular media, and fandom, cancel culture, black cultural practice, and digital activism, cancel culture, u.s. conservatism, and nation, cancel culture and digital nationalism in mainland china, back matter.

“Cancel culture” has become one of the most charged concepts in contemporary culture and politics, but mainstream critiques from both the left and the right provide only snapshots of responses to the phenomenon. Takinga media and cultural studies perspective, this book traces the origins of cancel practices and discourses, and discusses their subsequent evolution within celebrity and fan cultures, consumer culture, and national politics in the U.S. and China. Moving beyond popular press accounts about the latest targets of cancelling or familiar free speech debates, this analysis identifies multiple lineages for both cancelling and criticisms about cancelling, underscoring the various configurations of power associated with “cancel culture” in particular cultural and political contexts. 

• Cancel culture
• Entertainment fandom
• Social justice
• Celebrity culture
• Media activism
• Fan studies

Eve Ng is Associate Professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Ohio University, USA. Her interdisciplinary scholarship examines LGBTQ media, digital media cultures, and constructions of national identity. She has published in numerous journals,including Communication , Culture & Critique , Development and Change ,  Feminist Media Studies , Feminist Studies ,  International Journal of Communication , Journal of Film and Video ,  Popular Communication , and Transformative Works and Culture . 

Book Title : Cancel Culture

Book Subtitle : A Critical Analysis

Authors : Eve Ng

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97374-2

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Literature, Cultural and Media Studies , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-97373-5 Published: 24 March 2022

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-97376-6 Published: 25 March 2023

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-97374-2 Published: 23 March 2022

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : IX, 153

Topics : Cultural Studies , Media and Communication

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Cancel culture can be collectively validating for groups experiencing harm

Associated data.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://osf.io/qftn8/ .

Introduction

Social psychological research on collective action and intergroup harm has yet to adequately consider the potential role of cancel culture or feelings of collective validation in motivating collective action. The current research will begin to fill this gap and may broaden our understanding of the psychological mechanisms that inspire and maintain collective action in response to intergroup harm. To our knowledge, this research is the first social psychological analysis of the impact of cancel culture on collective action and as means for producing feelings of collective validation.

In two experimental studies, participants read a story describing an event of discrimination against their group followed by a manipulation of the presence or absence of an episode of cancel culture. Study 1 samples woman university students ( N = 520) and focuses on their responses to a sexist incident on campus. Study 2 (pre-registered) assesses the generality of the model in a racism context with a community sample of East Asian Canadians and Americans ( N = 237).

Study 1 showed that an episode of cancel culture had an indirect positive effect on collective action intentions mediated by feelings of collective validation and collective empowerment. Study 2 showed the indirect effect of cancel culture on collective action intentions mediated by feelings of collective validation and collective anger and contempt.

The current research offers a novel theoretical and empirical introduction to the concept of collective validation and the understudied context of cancel culture to the existing social psychological research and theory on collective action. Further, cancel culture has been criticized as problematic. However, this perspective centres those in positions of power. Through this research, we hope to shift the focus onto marginalized groups’ perspectives of episodes of cancel culture. This research shows that groups who experience harm find these episodes of cancel culture validating in ways that have yet to be fully explored by intergroup relations research. Further, these findings suggest that collective validation does mediate the relationship between cancel culture and collective action; thus, cancel culture becomes an important contributor to resistance by marginalized groups through collective validation.

Cancel culture involves the highly visible calling for and enacting of boycotts, condemnation, and social exiling of a person or group whose harmful behaviours or attitudes have been deemed unacceptable, offensive, or inappropriate. While predominately online, the practice of cancelling and cancel culture predates the internet and has its foundations in Black liberation and protest. Anne Charity Hudley, chair of linguistics of African America for the University of California Santa Barbara, states,

[w]hile the terminology of cancel culture may be new and most applicable to social media through Black Twitter, in particular, the concept of being canceled is not new to Black culture [… cancelling is] a survival skill as old as the Southern black use of the boycott (from Romano, 2020 ) .

She likens cancel culture to protest and boycott of people and groups, rather than businesses, and describes cancel culture as a way to empower those whose voices are marginalized; “ it’s a collective way of saying, ‘We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] we are not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you’ ” (quote from Romano, 2020 ).

However, cancel culture has been criticized by some as more problematic than helpful ( Ronson, 2016 ; Hagi, 2019 ; Romano, 2020 ; see also Drury, 2002 for reactionary crowds). Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) advocate and social media influencer, Beecham (2021) argues that while the goal of cancel culture is to combat prejudice, in practice it often redirects prejudice to a new target through “us vs. them” thinking. Beecham’s argument implies a singular goal of cancel culture as combatting prejudice and claims that cancel culture is ineffective in achieving this goal. It seems hasty to claim that cancel culture’s only goal – or main goal – is to combat prejudice, and conclusions about the overall value of this social practice are premature without first considering a wider range of possible goals and impacts, especially the impacts on those who have been harmed and are speaking up. This is not to say that Beecham has neglected to consider the impacts of cancel culture on harmed groups, or that all her critiques of cancel culture are or erroneous – many have merit. Rather, we propose that cancel culture, whether effective at reducing prejudice or not, may reduce the impact of harm and/or elicit other productive forms of collective action. Harmed groups may benefit from the support, validation, and visibility from others who are involved in cancelling perpetrators of harm. That is, an episode of cancel culture might provide the conditions for the harmed group to experience feelings of collective validation that, in turn, could increase feelings of empowerment that inspire or maintain collective action.

To our knowledge, this research is the first social psychological analysis of the impact of cancel culture on collective action. In addition, research on collective action in response to intergroup harm has yet to adequately consider the role of feelings of collective validation as a motivator of collective action. The current research will begin to fill this gap and in so doing may broaden our understanding of the psychological mechanisms that inspire and maintain collective responses to intergroup harm.

Feelings of collective validation

Validation is typically understood as the recognition and affirmation of a person’s experiences and an affirmation of their feelings as legitimate. In clinical trauma therapy, practitioners have successfully used validation to support patient wellbeing and have identified feelings of validation as an important and necessary component of recovery and healing following harm (e.g., Hong and Lishner, 2016 ; Özeke-Kocabaş and Üstündağ-Budak, 2017 ). However, this research focuses on the psychopathology of trauma and practitioners’ use of trauma validation to support individual clients in interpersonal contexts. To develop the concept of intergroup validation, it may be valuable to consider group-based harm (discrimination, harassment, oppression, etc.) as trauma ( Carter, 2007 ). Thus, the concept of validation might also be useful when understanding and thinking about responses to intergroup harm.

Discussions and investigations of validation within social psychological literature are scant, but there are a few. Kalkhoff (2005) describes collective validation as occurring when “ bystanders copy or refrain from challenging a lower-status actor’s deference to a higher-status actor [or] validate deferential behavior collectively by pressuring a recalcitrant lower-status actor to defer to a higher-status counterpart ” (p. 59). More simply, Kalkhoff is suggesting that the behaviours of bystanders validate social norms within groups by pressuring lower-status members to conform or by refraining from challenging the submission of those with lower-status. However, this use of group validation focuses on intra group relations, where members of a single group validate the actions of their own group members. Contrastingly, collective validation as an intergroup phenomenon would involve the feeling that one’s group and its experiences have been recognized and validated by members of other groups. Additionally, Kalkhoff’s definition describes only how validation can further marginalize those of “lower-status” and fails to recognize that validation might also occur where a “lower-status” group challenges a “higher- status” group – members of other groups may validate the harmed group, recognize the illegitimacy of the harm, and even join them to challenge the actions of the perpetrator group and demand reparations. Therefore, we can extend Kalkhoff’s conceptualization of collective validation by examining group-based harm where the harmed group challenges the perpetrator’s behaviour and demands justice.

An interesting and relevant example of validation is present in Foster et al.’s (2021) research on women’s expectations of validation from others for engaging in online collective action. They found that when women expected greater validation for their social media activism, they showed more interest in future collective action. However, validation in Foster and colleagues’ work focused on experiences of personal validation (validation of me as a person – likable, friendly, etc.). In addition, this work focuses on expectations that one will be validated for future actions. Here, we hope to expand on this by focusing specifically on actual experienced feelings of collective validation (the feeling that one’s group is being validated).

Interestingly, collective validation of group-based harm is also briefly described in the literature on collective apologies (e.g., Hornsey and Wohl, 2013 ), where recognition of a group’s continued suffering and commitment to redress by the perpetrator group are seen as essential to an effective apology. An effective apology should offer this kind of validation. However, while a collective apology offers validation of a group’s suffering and their responses to that suffering, we propose that collective validation following harm may be sought from groups other than the perpetrators – from a wider range of agents, including ingroup members and especially members of the superordinate category (see Turner et al., 1987 ) – the larger, more inclusive group that includes the harmed group, the perpetrator group, and other groups. Thus, although the validation offered by perpetrators through apologies may be important, validation by third party groups may also be particularly valuable.

Harmed groups receiving support from a third party is also explored by Simon and Klandermans’ (2001) triangular model of politicized collective identity. This model proposes three steps that lead harmed group members to become politicized and act against harm. First, group members become aware of the harm and agree that it is unwanted (awareness of shared grievances). Next, they identify an adversary to whom they attribute the harm (adversarial attribution). If this adversary does not address their harmful behaviours, the harmed group seeks to connect with members of the broader society to gain support. Although Simon and Klandermans do not explicitly consider that the participation of third parties can serve as validation, they do consider other consequences for this recruitment of a third party, such as structuring of the understanding of the conflict as one including opponents and potential allies, rather than “ bipolar in-group/out-group confrontation ” (p. 328). This broadens the meaning of collective action to include both actions aimed at opponents (or perpetrators) and action aimed at recruiting third party allies. This implies that the contributions of other groups (third parties) are desirable and valuable to disadvantaged group members. We propose that one reason for this is that third parties offer not only a strategic advantage but also psychological validation of the ingroup and its struggle. In addition, Simon and Klandermans’ ideas map nicely onto the context of cancel culture, where members of other groups within the larger society join in the action and thus evidence themselves as potential allies with the harmed group.

Finally, most discussions of validation describe validation in terms of the actions of those who are providing validation. Thus, validation is conceptualised in terms of the behaviours of others that are intended to create the conditions for members of the harmed group to feel validated . However, these behaviours may or may not produce these feelings. Thus, any action by others is only validating to the degree that the harmed group experiences it as such. Therefore, we propose that collective validation is more aptly understood as the psychological experience of those who are targeted. Thus, the current research centers the psychological experience of the harmed group by describing and measuring collective validation as the feelings of those who have been harmed.

Cancel culture and feelings of collective validation

Okimoto and Wenzel (2008) describe how intergroup transgressions can threaten the status and power equilibrium and also threaten the validity of common values that the victim group expects are shared across the superordinate category (their community or society). The kinds of transgressions that lead to episodes of cancel culture often involve acts that threaten the victim group’s status, power and autonomy/control over their reputation (e.g., a sexist comment threatens the status and diminishes the power and autonomy of all women in that context). This is especially salient in intergroup relations where the status of the offending group may come at the expense the harmed group. Simultaneously, values the victim believes are shared broadly within society are also violated, threatening the validity of these values (e.g., the victim believes that society values women and sexist comments violate, and thus call into question, the general support of that value). According to Okimoto and Wenzel (2008) , a response to this injustice would need to address both concerns if justice is to be restored. We propose that both concerns may be partially addressed by an episode of cancel culture. When a perpetrator is “called out” for their offensive actions, they are given the opportunity to take responsibility, apologise, and restore justice. However, if the perpetrator refuses, the harmed group calls on the superordinate group – society – for justice. By isolating, humiliating, and diminishing the status of the offender, cancel culture involves the superordinate group communicating to the harmed group that their status, and autonomy over their reputation, and the importance of the shared values that had been violated by the offending group are indeed secure. Therefore, cancel culture offers to the harmed group the objective conditions that may lead to feelings of collective validation, through high visibility (e.g., amplifying the voices of harmed group members), public denouncing of social norm violation (i.e., “ we agree that the sexist comment violates a norm ”), punishment of the perpetrators and calls for justice (i.e., through cancelling and public shame), and explicit support for the harmed group (e.g., “ we believe, see, hear, and agree with you ”).

Thus, cancelling of the offending group may provide the conditions that lead members of the harmed group to feel validated through the participation of the superordinate group in reaffirming and recognizing the harmed group’s status and power, and restoring shared values in defense of the harmed group. In part this is done by increasing the visibility of the offense while simultaneously decreasing the visibility of the offender, and by increasing the visibility of the harmed group’s response to the offense, thus amplifying the voices of marginalised groups.

This process reflects Banet-Weiser’s (2018) claim that online societies function through an inequality of power, where power is embodied through visibility and attention and often politicized and commodified. Attention – in the form of likes, shares, and trending hashtags – becomes a means to promote specific online content following the same socioeconomic politics of power as the offline world. When actions challenge deeper systems of oppression and power, they become undesirable and are less likely to attract attention. Banet-Weiser explains that many popular and commodified online feminist movements, for example, fail to “ challenge deep structures of inequalities ” (p. 11) and this failure makes them more palatable to those in power and, consequently, leads them to be more visible. Additionally, “for some images and practices to become visible, others [those that do challenge deep structures of inequalities] must be rendered invisible” (p. 11). Cancelling a perpetrator group or its members can, at times, amplify and make more visible harmed and marginalized groups.

Thus, visibility may be key in inspiring feelings of collective validation as it offers public recognition and the possibility that others will also affirm the suffering caused by intergroup harm. Therefore, this research uses the context of cancel culture as one that could inspire feelings of collective validation after group-based harm because it includes the following:

• It is provided by members of a superordinate group
• It directly recognizes that harm was done to a particular group
• It explicitly affirms the harmed group’s emotional responses to that harm
• It supports and amplifies the harmed group in challenging the perpetrator group’s actions and in demanding justice
• It has high public visibility

Even when limited and sporadic, episodes of cancel culture may have positive influences on social change through amplifying the harmed group’s voices, by temporarily canceling powerful and harmful voices, and by raising the visibility of marginalized groups. This explicit recognition and support (i.e., validation) of a harmed group may allow them to recognize their collective power (i.e., feeling of collective empowerment) and thus motivate continued efforts for social change. Therefore, we propose that one way that cancel culture can influence subsequent actions is through the resulting experience (or subjective feeling) of collective validation and its subsequent impact on feelings of collective empowerment.

Collective empowerment and collective action

We propose that experiencing validation following harm can play an important role in building the sense of collective empowerment that is critical for members of disadvantaged groups to initiate, join, and continue their involvement in collective action directed at social change (e.g., Drury and Reicher, 1999 ). Rappaport (1987) defines collective empowerment as the phenomenon or process of being able or allowed to do something because there is control or authority over that thing. Similarly, Wright (2010) conceptualises perceived collective control as comprised of two beliefs: “( 1 ) that social change is contingent upon behavior (i.e. , that the situation is modifiable ) and (2) that [ a person’s ] group in particular can execute the behaviors necessary to produce the desired change ” (p.864; see also Zimmerman and Rappaport, 1988 ).

Both representations of empowerment support the contention that collective empowerment includes two components. One is the belief that one’s group has the power to influence the social environment. However, one cannot experience these feelings of efficacy or power if one first does not first perceive the social environment as malleable to influence. That is, one must first perceive “instability” ( Tajfel and Turner, 1979 ) in the current social environment. Therefore, collective empowerment involves perceptions of instability and collective efficacy. Thus, while collective validation is the feeling that one’s group’s experiences – especially with harm – are recognised, valued, and affirmed by a superordinate group, collective empowerment is the feeling that the social environment that generated harm can be changed (instability) and that one’s group has the power and means to change it (efficacy).

Thus, if experiencing collective validation serves to heighten feelings of empowerment – then cancel culture may lead marginalized groups to engage in collective efforts to achieve social change indirectly through the psychological mechanisms of feelings of collective validation and collective empowerment.

Collective emotions and collective action

In addition to recognizing and condemning the harm done to the group, cancel culture might also offer legitimacy to collective emotions such as anger and contempt. Thus, the feeling of validation that results from an episode of cancel culture could also include the sense that one’s strong negative emotions about perpetrators of harm are appropriate, which in turn may strengthen the expression of emotions that are well-documented to provide one the psychological foundation for collective action – outgroup-directed anger and contempt. For example, Stürmer and Simon (2009) found that anger was a direct predictor of collective action as it provided an avenue for participants to relieve aggressive tension. Similarly, van Zomeren et al. (2008a) identify group-based anger as a unique pathway to collective action (see also Tausch et al., 2011 ; van Zomeren et al., 2012 ; van Zomeren, 2013 ) describing how “emotional social support validates the group-based appraisal of [an] event, which also affirms emotional responses like anger” ( van Zomeren et al., 2004 , p. 650). However, few of these studies focus on the combination of anger and contempt.

Anger and contempt are distinct, yet highly related emotions. Mackie et al. (2000) argue that anger – which is the emotional evaluation of someone’s actions – is related to “action tendencies against the triggering agent” (p. 610) or attack behaviours (e.g., violence, arguing). Contempt is the emotional evaluation of someone’s worth and is related to exclusionary actions (e.g., avoidance or exiling behaviour). Groups that are traditionally marginalized by oppressive systems may feel contempt for perpetrator groups following incidents of harm because of the long history of attempts to address injustices with little success. Simultaneously, these harmed groups might still hope for an end to oppression – which requires cooperation from perpetrator groups – and, thus, being angry or frustrated with the perpetrator groups for their lack of cooperation in resolving conflict.

Evident in most episodes of cancel culture is the presence of both anger and contempt where participants engage in both attack and exclusionary actions simultaneously. The act of attacking someone’s reputation is an anger response. Social exiling of perpetrators is a contempt response to unacceptable behaviour. This mixture of anger and contempt make cancel culture an interesting example of intergroup conflict.

Further, the participation of superordinate group members in cancelling of the perpetrators may communicate to the harmed group that their emotional responses of both anger and contempt are reasonable, merited, and valid. The resulting feeling of validation of one’s anger and contempt on behalf of their group’s experience may serve to increase these emotions, which should in turn increase their likelihood of engaging in collective action. Therefore, this current research will assess whether the subjective feelings of validation that emerges as a result of an episode of cancel culture also enhance anger and contempt which should lead to greater willingness to engage in collective action.

Theoretical model

This theorizing results in a sequential mediational model that proposes that, following collective harm, an episode of cancel culture should elicit feelings of collective validation in the harmed group. This experience of collective validation strengthens feeling of both collective empowerment and the collective emotions of anger and contempt, which in turn lead to stronger intentions to engage in collective action. Thus, it is predicted that an episode of cancel culture will have indirect positive impacts on collective anger and contempt, feelings of collective empowerment, and collective action that are mediated by feelings of collective validation.

The current research

Two experimental studies test the model presented in Figure 1 . Study 1 uses a university student sample and focuses on the responses of women to a blatantly sexist incident on campus. Study 2 uses a community sample of East Asian Canadians and Americans and focuses on an episode of cancel culture in response to an act of anti-East Asian discrimination.

Theoretical mediation model.

In both studies it is expected that being exposed to an episode of cancel culture, versus a control condition, will increase collective action intentions and behaviours. This effect will be sequentially mediated first by feelings of collective validation, followed by both collective anger and contempt and collective empowerment (see Figure 1 ). We do not have a priori predictions about a direct pathway between the manipulation of cancel culture and collective anger and contempt or between the manipulation of cancel culture and collective empowerment.

Study 1: sexism and university women

Participants.

Data were collected between October 2021 and March 2022. Cases were removed if participants did not complete the survey (133 cases), spent less than 500 s (approximately 8 min; 17 cases), or spent more than 7,200 s (120 min; 65 cases) on the survey. 1 Finally, repeating cases were removed (20 cases). The final sample, after removing problematic cases (e.g., nonconsenting, repeated submissions, etc.), consisted of 520 university women. Demographic information is listed in Table 1 .

Summary of participant demographics (Study 1).

University women were recruited online using the Psychology Department’s Research Participation System (RPS). Participants were told that the researchers were “ interested in understanding perceptions of community responses to contentious incidents and topics in campus environments .” Those who signed up for the study were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In both conditions, participants read a fictitious scenario of a sexist incident on campus. In the cancel culture condition this incident was followed by a description of a highly visible episode of cancel culture against the perpetrator group. In the control condition, the incident was followed by some filler/neutral information about unrelated activities on campus.

Following exposure to the given condition, participants responded to measures of feelings of collective validation, collective empowerment, anger, contempt, and collective action intentions.

Cancel culture condition

The cancel culture condition included a scenario describing a sexist incident on campus (modeled on a real event at Texas Tech University; see Barbato, 2014 ; Servantes, 2014 ) followed by a description of a targeted campaign by others from the community to cancel a fictitious fraternity (e.g., #EndEtaNu). The episode of cancel culture includes components naturally found in real-world cancel culture scenarios such as high visibility (“ […] the post had 200 likes and has been shared over 30 times by the university community and beyond ”), public denouncing of norm violation (“ women on campus have every right to be pissed ”), punishment of the perpetrators (“ Two Eta Nu members […] fired from a co-op position and […] suspended from the swim team ”) and calls for justice (“ A petition […] calling for the removal of Eta Nu chapter and already has over 1,500 signatures in less than a week ”), and objective support of the harmed group (“ this is hurtful and has very real consequences for women on campus ”).

Control condition

The control condition included the sexist incident on campus scenario, but the description of the campaign to cancel the fraternity was replaced with filler information about other homecoming incidents unrelated to the sexist incident or to issues of gender or sexism more generally (e.g., vandalism and littering, a student getting stuck on top of a residence building).

This measure was constructed for this study.

Participants responded to 24 items consistent with the definition of subjective or felt collective validation previously outlined (e.g., “ Experiences of harm faced by women are recognized by the university community ”) on a 7-point scale (1 Strongly disagree to 7 Strongly agree ). Higher scores indicate greater felt collective validation ( α =0 .79). See Appendix A . 2

Collective anger and contempt

Participants responded to 8 items measuring anger and contempt ( Mackie et al., 2000 ). They reported the extent to which they felt angry, displeased, irritated, furious, contemptuous, disgusted, repelled, and sick on 5-point scales (1 Not at all to 5 Extremely ). Higher scores indicate greater reported feelings of anger and contempt ( α =0.94). While Mackie et al. use two separate measures for anger and contempt, this study uses one since Mackie et al. found a high correlation between the two emotions, which was mirrored in these data ( r = 0.86).

Collective empowerment

Our initial conceptualization of empowerment research included perceived instability and collective efficacy. However, our 3-item measure of perceived instability of the relationship between the perpetrator group and harmed group adapted from Mummendey et al. (1999) and Wright et al. (2020) had very low reliability ( α = 0.56) and including it undermined the reliability of our measure of collective empowerment. Thus, these three items were not included, and the overall final measure of collective empowerment included two scales.

The second was a 5-item measure of collective efficacy adapted from Sabherwal et al. (2021) . Participants rated how likely “ Women on campus, working together, can influence the following groups to do something about gender-based violence on campus ”: (a) the federal government, (b) the provincial government, (c) the local government, (d) university administrators, and (e) fraternity leaders on 7-point scales (1 Not at all to 7 Extremely ). Higher scores indicate greater perceived collective efficacy ( α = 0.85).

The third measure was a more general measure of empowerment that included 4 items measuring women’s feelings of strength, control, and power (e.g., “ I feel that women on campus are strong ”) on a 7-point agreement scale (1 Strongly disagree to 7 Strongly agree ). Higher scores indicate greater feelings of empowerment ( α = 0.81).

The collective efficacy and general empowerment measures were aggregated to provide a single collective empowerment score with higher scores indicating greater feelings of empowerment ( α = 0.80).

Collective action intentions

Participants responded to 10 items measuring their willingness to participate in various forms of anti-sexism activism (e.g., “ I would participate in a rally demanding equal salaries for men and women ”; “ I would act against sexism in general ”) on 7-point scales (1 Very unlikely to 7 Very likely ). This measure was adapted from Becker and Wright (2011) for use in a 2022 Canadian Context (e.g., “ I would donate for a women’s organization which lobbies for women’s rights, such as Terres des femmes ” was changed to “ I would donate to an organization that advocates for women’s rights, such as Canadian Women’s Foundation ”). Higher scores indicate stronger intentions to participate in collective action ( α = 0.92).

Predicted mediational analyses

The hypothesised model using the measure of Collective Action Intentions as the dependent variable was assessed using SPSS PROCESS Model 81 ( Hayes, 2022 ).

Condition (cancel culture vs. control) had a significant direct effect on Feelings of Collective Validation, which also had a significant direct effect on Collective Empowerment. Collective Empowerment had a significant direct effect on Collective Action Intention. The direct effect of Condition on Collective Action Intentions was not significant, and the only significant indirect effect of Condition on Collective Action Intention was a sequential mediation through both Feelings of Collective Validation and Collective Empowerment [ β = 0.03, 95% CI (0.01, 0.05)]. The causal steps approach to mediational analyses (see Baron and Kenny, 1986 ) held that a direct effect of the independent variable on the final outcome variable (or the total effect) should be a “gatekeeper” to mediational analyses. However, more recent statisticians have argued against this approach ( Shrout and Bolger, 2002 ; Hayes, 2009 ) and have suggested using bootstrapping to test for indirect effects ( MacKinnon et al., 2004 ). This bootstrapping method is the approach taken in Hayes SPSS PROCESS Macro ( Hayes, 2022 ) that was used for these analyses. Therefore, these results suggest the need to consider other possible pathways between Condition and Collective Action Intentions that were not included in this model ( Table 2 ).

Correlation matrix for all variables.

The predicted direct effect of Feelings of Collective Validation on Collective Emotions was non-significant and thus the sequential indirect effect of Condition on Collective Action Intentions mediated by Feelings of Collective Validation and Collective Emotions was non-significant ( β = −0.00, 95% CI (−0.01, 0.01)). However, the direct effect of Collective Emotions on Collective Action Intentions was significant. See Table 3 and Figure 2 for details of these direct effects.

Direct effects of predicted model 81.

Study 1 mediation model result. Partial support for the predicted sequential indirect effects of condition on collective action intention mediated by feelings of collective validation, collective anger and contempt, collective empowerment. * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.01.

This first experimental study provides initial evidence that being exposed to an episode of cancel culture does elicit feelings of collective validation and these feelings are associated with a stronger sense of collective empowerment which in turn is associated with greater collective action intention. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a positive relationship between exposure to cancel culture and intentions to engage in collective action has been demonstrated using an experimental design. However, the correlation between Condition and Collective Action Intentions is small (−0.01), implying the possible presence of other pathways in the total model. Regardless, despite legitimate critiques of cancel culture and a recognition that, like cancel culture itself, these effects may be limited in time and scope, it does appear cancel culture in response to a blatant act of sexism can have a positive impact on women’s interest in taking actions to fight gender inequality.

Collective empowerment and feelings of collective validation

While collective – and personal – empowerment has been linked to greater collective action in previous work ( Drury and Reicher, 1999 ; van Zomeren et al., 2008b ; Wright, 2010 ), this research provides preliminary support for the role of collective validation as a precursor for women’s sense of collective empowerment and, thus, intentions to participate in collective action. Therefore, future research on motivating factors for collective action may benefit from the inclusion of feelings of collective validation and consider sources of this validation (e.g., cancel culture). It is also possible that instances of allyship such as cancel culture elicit collective validation of a group’s existing power through communicating collective care and, thus, group value (i.e., “ we care about your wellbeing and experiences with harm because you matter ”; e.g., Smith, 1997 ; Weis et al., 2006 ; Bradbury-Jones et al., 2011 ). This is not to say that cancel culture should be used to motivate groups toward collective action, rather it serves as an interesting and important example of allyship from a superordinate group that may, through collective validation (i.e., recognition, support, and increased visibility) of a harmed group, foster the collective empowerment needed to motivate groups toward collective action.

Emotions and feelings of collective validation

Consistent with previous research (e.g., Stürmer and Simon, 2009 ; Tausch et al., 2011 ; Shepherd and Evans, 2020 ), stronger feelings of anger and contempt were associated with stronger collective action intentions. However, this relationship seems to be separate from cancel culture and feelings of collective validation. One may argue that the collective validation that emerges from cancel culture may alleviate feelings of anger and contempt. However, the women in the current study were substantially angry and contemptuous ( x ̄ =4.43, SD = 0.71, on a 5-point scale). Hence, two other possible explanations for this finding are that (1) emotions constitute a pathway toward collective action that is separate from collective validation and that these emotions are more influenced by the nature of the harmful/unjust actions of the perpetrator group than by the subsequent responses to those actions and (2) there is a difference between affective social support and instrumental social support present in this research.

van Zomeren et al. (2008a) social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) proposes three distinct predictors of collective action: affective justice (emotional responses to perceived injustice – such as anger); politicized identity; and collective efficacy. Therefore, it is possible that collective anger and contempt are motivating collective action intention for reasons separate from feelings of collective validation.

In addition, according to van Zomeren et al. (2004) , emotional social support (support of the harmed group’s emotions and opinions) influenced collective action through collective anger, whereas instrumental social support (direct action by a superordinate group to correct the injustice) influenced collective action through collective efficacy (see also van Zomeren et al., 2008a affective vs. nonaffective injustice). Therefore, it is also possible that the cancel culture scenario presented in the current research elicited a sense of instrumental social support more so than emotional social support resulting in the lack of a relationship between feelings of collective validation and collective anger and contempt. For example, the campus community petitioning administration to expel the perpetrators and enact consequences for the Eta Nu fraternity may have been viewed by participants as instrumental collective validation (or social support) since these examples represent public actions.

Improvements for study 2

Study 2 will extend the current findings with three important changes from Study 1. First, we will test the generality of the findings by focusing on a different intergroup relationship. Thus, Study 2, includes a community sample of East Asian Canadians and Americans and focuses on responses to an incident of Anti-Asian discrimination. Second, in order to better consider the impact of emotions as mediators, the scenario presenting the manipulation will include more messages that reflect affective responses ( van Zomeren et al., 2004 ). Third, to streamline the data collection, the 2-part measure of collective empowerment used in Study 1 will be replaced by a simpler, more direct measure ( Moya-Garófano et al., 2021 ).

Study 2: anti-East Asian racism

Incidents of violence and anti-East Asian hate crimes are on the rise following the 2020 COVID-19 outbreaks ( Chen et al., 2020 ). In addition, the East Asian diaspora is beginning to speak openly about this xenophobia and racism. Prior to these recent events, racism toward East Asian Canadians and Americans has typically been marginalised and downplayed, at times even by East Asian communities (e.g., Tai, 2020 ; Shao and Lin, 2021 ). This may be in part due to the Model Minority Myth (MMM) that minimises and marginalizes East Asian communities and groups’ experiences with racism since they are viewed as passive, privileged, successful and even as “honorary whites” who do not complain or protest like other systemically marginalised groups ( Aguirre and Lio, 2008 ; Yoo et al., 2010 ; Lee, 2022 ). Thus, East Asian peoples may fear that drawing attention to themselves via collective action against anti-East Asian racism might result in backlash and more racist discrimination, rather than support or solidarity, from the dominant groups that endorse the MMM. Wei et al. (2010) found that Asian American women who endorsed direct confrontations of gender discrimination reported more negative outcomes including decreased life satisfaction. While the MMM has received considerable academic and public critique, it remains a common representation of East Asian communities in both the US and Canada. The resulting lack of public attention has also led to limited attention from social psychological and anti-racism research. However, anti-Asian racism has been rampant in North America for decades, and there is growing public discourse and activism ( Brockell, 2021 ; Government of Canada, 2021 ; Lee, 2022 ). Therefore, a focus on anti- East Asian discrimination and collective responses to it are both important and timely. Thus, we will use this context to explore the role of cancel culture, feelings of collective validation, emotions, and collective empowerment in motivating collective action.

Focus group

Prior to beginning the study, the second author conducted a focus group with East Asian Canadian students. The rationale was to include members of East Asian communities early in the research process as we were developing the content of the manipulations and adapting the measures to this new intergroup context. It was important that the scenarios and measures be respectful of East Asian cultures, perspectives, experiences, and communities. The specific goal of the focus group was to gauge how East Asian students responded to an early draft of the scenarios used in the manipulation and to use their feedback to make alterations. In addition, it was important that the list of potential collective actions was culturally relevant (e.g., would members of East Asian communities be likely to attend a protest).

In the focus group, the students read both the control and cancel culture fictitious racism scenarios and the collective action intention measure and provided feedback on each. No changes were made to the fictitious scenarios as a result of the focus group feedback. We received positive feedback from participants about the realism, cultural sensitivity, and participant responses to both the control and cancel culture conditions. However, the collective action measure was modified to include some actions in which the group indicated members of East Asian communities would be more likely to engage (e.g., writing to government officials).

Data was collected via Prolific , an online survey research platform for social sciences. The survey was available to participants who were of East Asian descent and residing in either Canada or the United States. Participants were remunerated with $6 USD for approximately 30 min of time. Cases were removed if participants did not complete the core measures of the survey (33 cases) or spent less than 500 s (approximately 8 min; 12 cases). 3 Despite using Prolific demographic filters, some participants did not indicate being of East Asian descent and these cases were removed (17 cases). Due to a technological error, the randomly assigned condition for two participants was not recorded by Qualtrics and these cases were removed. The total sample following removal of problematic cases consisted of 237 self-identified East Asian Canadian and American participants. Demographic information is listed in Table 4 below.

Summary of participant demographics (Study 2).

In this pre-registered experiment, 4 Participants were told that the researchers were interested in “understanding responses to contentious online topics and behaviours.” Those who signed up for the study were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In both conditions, participants read a fictitious scenario of a racist incident in the Vancouver community. In the cancel culture condition this was followed by a description of an episode of cancel culture against the perpetrator group. In the control condition, participants read only the scenario of a racist incident without any additional information. Following exposure to the given condition, participants responded to measures of the same variables in Study 1.

Manipulation

The cancel culture condition included a scenario describing a racist incident in the community followed by a description of a targeted campaign by others from the community to cancel the perpetrator. While the racist incident described in the scenario was fictitious, it was based on real experiences of East Asian and Pacific Islander Canadians and Americans throughout the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., Kambhampaty and Sakaguchi, 2020 ; Baylon and Cecco, 2021 ). Descriptions of these real-world experiences were reviewed prior to writing the scenario. The episode of cancel culture included components naturally found in real-world cancel culture scenarios such as high visibility (“ the post had 2,200 likes and has been shared over 300 times by the Vancouver community and beyond ”); public denouncing of norm violation (“ This is deplorable, especially during a time when we should be working together ”); punishment of the perpetrators (e.g., calls for police investigations and expulsion from programs) and calls for justice (“ It’s time for racists in this community to face the consequences of their actions ”); and expressions of support of the harmed group (“ East-Asian people are right to expect better from their neighbors ”).

Control scenario

The control condition included the same racist incident but did not include the description of the cancel culture episode.

Participants responded to 24-items consistent with the definition of feelings of collective validation (e.g., “ The experiences of harm faced by East Asian people are recognized by the community ”). Responses were provided on a 5-point scale (1 Strongly disagree to 5 Strongly agree ). Higher scores indicate greater felt collective validation ( α = 0.91). See Appendix A . 5

Participants responded to a shorter (4-item rather than 8-item) version of the anger (anger, frustration) and contempt (contemptuous and disgusted) measure adapted from Mackie et al. (2000) . Responses were provided on a 5-point scale (1 Not at all to 5 Extremely ). Higher scores indicate greater anger and contempt ( α = 0.90).

Participants responded to a 10-item measure that asked “ As an East Asian person, if I were in the situation described in the article, I would feel ”: empowered, in control of the situation, humiliated, inferior, defenseless, full of energy, stimulated, independent, not in control of the situation, and weak ( Moya-Garófano et al., 2021 ). Because of a technical error in the Qualtrics file, five of the 10 items (full of energy, stimulated, independent, not in control of the situation, and weak) were randomly omitted for 80 participants. Thus, a shorter 5-item version of the measure was used to maintain the entire sample. Responses were provided on a 5-point scale (1 Not at all to 5 Extremely ), and the reliability for this 5-item version was good ( α = 0.82; full 10-item measure α = 0.89). Scores for items indicating helplessness/disempowerment were reversed so that higher overall scores indicate greater feelings of collective empowerment.

Participants respond to 10-items about their willingness to participate in various forms of activism against anti-East Asian racism (e.g., “ Write a letter/email to government officials in my area regarding policies that impact East Asian peoples and cultures ”) on a 5-point scale (1 Very unlikely to 5 Very likely ). This measure was adapted from Becker and Wright (2011) for use with East Asian participants but was also informed by the focus group feedback with East Asian Canadian students regarding racism in their communities and ways they would be (un)likely to respond. Higher scores indicate greater willingness/intention to participate in collective action ( α = 0.90).

The results show a significant positive direct effect of Condition on Feelings of Collective Validation, but also a significant direct effect of Condition on Collective Empowerment that was not predicted. As predicted, there was a significant direct effect of Feelings of Collective Validation on Collective Empowerment. However, there was also a significant direct effect of Feelings of Collective Validation on Collective Anger and Contempt. In addition, there was a significant negative direct effect of Condition on Collective Anger and Contempt (not mediated by Feelings of Collective Validation) that was not predicted.

Further, Collective Anger and Contempt had a significant positive effect on Collective Action Intention, but the effect of Collective Empowerment on Collective Action Intention found in Study 1 did not emerge here.

Finally, significant indirect effects were found for Condition on Collective Action Intention mediated by Collective Anger and Contempt ( β = −0.16, 95% CI (−0.32, −0.04)), and for Condition on Collective Action Intention mediated sequentially by Collective Validation and Collective Anger and Contempt, and [ β = 0.09, 95% CI (0.02, 0.20)]. See Tables 5 , ​ ,6 6 and Figure 3 below for details.

*Correlation significant at the 0.05 level.

**Correlation significant at the 0.01 level.

Study 2 mediation model result. Partial support for the predicted sequential indirect effects of condition on collective action intention mediated by feelings of collective validation, collective anger and contempt. The direct effects of condition on collective anger and contempt and on collective empowerment were unexpected. * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.01.

Overall, there is support for the primary prediction that being exposed to an episode of cancel culture will elicit feelings of collective validation and that these feelings of collective validation will be positively associated with collective action intentions. However, the overall correlation between Condition and Collective Action Intentions was small, suggesting possible other variables in the total effect.

Further, it was collective validation’s positive influence on collective anger and contempt, rather than empowerment, that accounted for its positive association with collective action intentions. In fact, while exposure to an episode of cancel culture and the subsequent feelings of collective validation were associated with collective empowerment, this empowerment did not enhance collective action intentions.

The significant association between Feelings of Collective Validation and Collective Anger and Contempt found in Study 2 is consistent with van Zomeren et al.’s (2004) work on affective social support versus instrumental social support. The description of the cancel culture episode in Study 2 included more evidence of shared affective experiences (e.g., it included more emotionally charged comments such as, “If this bigot loses his business because of this, so be it ”), and this evidence of shared emotions appears to have served to validate the participants’ own feelings of collective anger and contempt. Thus, this aspect of validation may be similar to what van Zomeren et al. (2004) are describing as affective social support, which they have shown increases interest in collective action through increased anger (e.g., van Zomeren et al., 2008b ). Thus, it appears that cancel culture can serve to collectively validate action-oriented negative emotions like anger and contempt if the content and tone of cancelling focuses on these shared emotions. Thus, collective validation may lead to collective action through either what van Zomeren et al. (2004) have called an emotional (usually anger; see also van Zomeren et al., 2008a ) pathway or the collective empowerment pathway shown in Study 1 – or perhaps in some cases through both pathways.

Further, there was an interesting and unexpected negative direct effect of Condition on Collective Anger and Contempt and negative indirect effect of Condition on Collective Action Intentions mediated by Collective Anger and Contempt. These findings may indicate that for our East Asian participants, exposure to cancel culture in defense of their group may alleviate perpetrator-directed negative emotions such as anger and contempt, rather than increase them. Perhaps this is because, through engaging in cancel culture, the superordinate group shares the emotional burden of anger and contempt with the harmed group, especially if affective social support is present. However, these findings also emphasise the importance of the role of collective validation in the model. More research is needed to understand these effects fully.

Collective empowerment and collective action intentions

The lack of a significant effect of empowerment on collective action intention is inconsistent with the findings of previous research and theorizing (e.g., Drury et al., 2005 ), as well as the surprising significant negative collective validation and empowerment pathway in the exploratory analysis. There are several possible explanations for these findings. The measure of collective empowerment only included five of the 10 items because of a random error. It is also possible that the measure did not capture the aspects of collective empowerment that drive collective action.

Construct validity of collective empowerment measure

The Collective Empowerment measure may be measuring something other than empowerment as it is usually defined and understood. Items on this empowerment measure such as “ humiliated ,” “ inferior ,” and “ defenseless ” may be capturing feelings of safety and group status instead of empowerment ( Hartling and Luchetta, 1999 ; Edmondson, 2004 ; Farbod et al., 2017 ) that may lead participants to disengage in response to harmful situations to protect themselves and their communities from further harm or backlash.

To roughly assess the construct validity of the measure, Model 81 was reanalyzed using only the “ empowerment” and “ in control of the situation” items of the Collective Empowerment measure (α = 0.86). Both items include components of empowerment as defined by Rappaport (1987) and Wright (2010) and are consistent with the empowerment measure used in Study 1. Overall, participants reported low Collective Empowerment ( x ̄ =1.95, SD = 0.95 on a 5-point scale). However, results show a significant, but small, positive direct effect of Collective Empowerment on Collective Action Intentions ( β = 0.12, SE = 0.06, 95% CI (0.00, 0.25), p = 0.05), with small positive significant indirect effects of Condition on Collective Action Intentions mediated by Collective Empowerment ( β = 0.07, 95% CI (0.00, 0.17)) and of Condition on Collective Action Intentions mediated sequentially by Feelings of Collective Validation and Collective Empowerment ( β = 0.03, 95% CI (0.00, 0.06)). Thus, while the effects are small, there is evidence that the negative items on the Moya-Garófano et al. (2021) empowerment measure may be impacting the construct validity of the measure.

Feelings of collective validation and social identity

The social identity of East Asian peoples might be important for understanding the pathway from collective validation to collective action. Indeed, some prior research has identified social identity as an important and meaningful predictor of collective action. For example, van Zomeren et al.’s (2008a) SIMCA includes politicized identity as a main predictive pathway of collective action (see also Simon and Klandermans, 2001 ). Similarly, Foster et al. (2021) found politicized identity to be important for women engaging in online collective action. Thus, it is possible that the scenario in each study primed participants to think more about their woman (Study 1) or East Asian (Study 2) identities and this may be responsible for the differing empowerment and collective anger and contempt results.

Further, most of the literature on empowerment and collective action focuses on White Western samples and contexts (see Zimmerman, 2000 ; Lardier et al., 2020 ), which may not generalize to the East Asian Canadians/Americans in this sample. Therefore, it is possible that episodes of cancel culture that explicitly provide greater affective social support of the East Asian community (as was done in Study 2), may inspire the kind of collective validation that allows for greater expression of perpetrator-directed negative emotions. This may be, in part, because this affective social support directly challenges stereotypical expectations of East Asian people imposed by the MMM ( Aguirre and Lio, 2008 ; Yoo et al., 2010 ; Lee, 2022 ).

Therefore, future research should consider the important role of specific social identities and the nature of the existing intergroup relations experienced by those groups. Feelings of collective validation and its impact on emotions and collective empowerment may vary depending on the specific histories, and current social realities of these different groups.

As well, it should be noted that the cancel culture scenarios in both studies were based on real-world instances and widely understood definitions of cancel culture. For example, Ng (2020) states that cancel culture is “ the withdrawal of any kind of support (viewership, social media follows, purchases of products endorsed by the person, etc.) for those who are assessed to have said or done something unacceptable or highly problematic, generally from a social justice perspective especially alert to sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, bullying, and related issues ” (p. 623). The scenarios used in the current studies reflect this definition. However, it must also be recognized that no direct manipulation checks were used to assess whether participants perceived the scenarios to reflect or represent an episode of cancel culture. Thus, future studies should address this potential limitation by including manipulation checks or providing other direct evidence that participants recognized the scenarios as reflecting the core elements of cancel culture.

General discussion

Two experimental studies examined the role of feelings of collective validation in the context of cancel culture as an important determinant of collective action through its impact on collective empowerment and collective anger and contempt. Across both studies, there is evidence that feelings of collective validation play an important mediating role in the relationship between cancel culture and collective action intentions. However, the two studies provide a somewhat less definitive story concerning the mediational processes that account for collective validation’s association with collective action. Study 1 supports only a collective empowerment pathway from collective validation to collective action intentions in a sexism context, while Study 2 supports only a collective anger and contempt pathway from collective validation to collective action intentions in an anti-East Asian racism context.

Implications and future directions

Cancel culture, feelings of collective validation, and collective action intentions.

Overall, the present research provides novel evidence that cancel culture and feelings of collective validation should be included and examined in collective action research and theory. For example, through cancel culture, members of the superordinate group – which includes more than just members of the relevant ingroup and members of the perpetrator group – can be involved in challenging a perpetrator group’s actions and disrupting (however fleeting) the online economy of visibility and structures of inequalities. This support from other members of the superordinate group can be validating for members of the group that has been harmed and this validation can agitate them enough to challenge the individuals, groups, and systems that have perpetuated this harm.

These findings are consistent with a recent study by Foster et al. (2021 , see Study 2) who found that women were motivated toward collective action when they anticipated greater personal validation from others for responding to sexist tweets. Similarly, Droogendyk et al. (2016) identify “supportive contact” as an important determinant of increased collective action by the harmed group. This concept, in which an advantaged group member explicitly expresses their opposition to inequality and supports the harmed group’s goals, coincides with the elements of cancel culture (explicitly acknowledging harm and supporting group goals). Thus, it is possible that supportive contact elicits feelings of collective validation in similar ways as cancel culture and including measures of collective validation in future work on supportive contact may offer insights into the psychological mechanisms involved in its influences on collective action.

Cancel culture, collective validation, and Allyship

The present research also supports the inclusion of cancel culture and feelings of collective validation in research on allyship, as they appear to encompass important components of allyship. Along with supportive contact, Becker et al.’s (2022) (see also Becker and Wright, 2022) concept of “politicized contact” seems to be relevant to participation in cancel culture. In their work, Becker and colleagues show that contact that recognizes and includes discussion of group inequality is linked to greater solidarity-based allyship behaviour by advantaged group members. Thus, it seems that when members of the advantaged group, the harmed group, and even third-party groups all jointly engage, cancel culture could serve as a proxy for politicized contact and thus may increase solidarity-based collective action intentions among all three groups.

However, a critique of cancel culture is that it can backfire and alienate allies by making them afraid of being cancelled themselves for making simple mistakes. Ross (2021) claims “ [i]n our pursuit of political purity, we are alienating a lot of our allies, and we are criticizing them for not being ‘woke’ enough .” To address this strain on the ally-ingroup relationship, Ross promotes “call in” culture where allies and group members can have open, non-judgmental conversations about harm. Ross claims that call-in culture is about “ achieving accountability with grace, love, and respect as opposed to anger, shame, and humiliation .” This “call in” approach shares much with Becker et al.’s (2022) description of politicized contact and thus these conversations may well serve to increase allyship behaviours among the advantaged group.

However, the issue with positioning call-in culture and cancel culture against each other is that the goals and motivations of these two practices differ substantially. The goal for call-in culture, according to Ross, is to end oppression through meaningful work with allies, while one goal of cancel culture is to hold accountable powerful and perpetrator groups and people who refuse to hold themselves accountable. While calling someone in might be helpful with a willing and open ally, what happens when calling in fails because the harmful party refuses to acknowledge the harm they have caused? Who holds them responsible? How do we call in those with political and social power (e.g., celebrities, billionaires, politicians, police) who refuse to acknowledge their harmful actions? Thus, while Ross is correct in stating that the goal of the human rights movement is “ to end oppression ” and that call-in culture may be an effective method for achieving this long-term goal, it may also be true that a one-size-fits-all approach to achieving this goal is too narrow. Call-in culture may be less helpful where those who are marginalized and harmed are continuously silenced by their oppressors (e.g., as victims of sexual violence). In these situations, silencing perpetrators, prioritising support, and amplification of the harmed group seem more immediately important, especially if the harmed group deals with unique stereotypes and expectations based on their group identity (such as the MMM for East Asian communities). Therefore, cancel culture, as supported by the current research, may be effective in immediate harm-reduction for the harmed group in the form of feelings of collective validation and a subsequent stronger intention to work for change that may be another path to a long-term shift away from oppression.

The current research offers a novel theoretical and empirical introduction to the concept of collective validation and the understudied context of cancel culture to the existing research and theory in the social psychological literature on collective action and related topics (e.g., allyship). We found strong support that cancel culture is collectively validating for harmed groups, and that these feelings of collective validation mediate the relationship between cancel culture and collective action intentions. Therefore, we suggest and hope that future intergroup relations research on collective action and related concepts continue to utilise collective validation and cancel culture to deepen psychological understanding of collective action motivations and various psychological outcomes for harmed groups (e.g., wellbeing and life satisfaction, collective action intention and behaviour, empowerment, group identity, etc.).

Data availability statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Simon Fraser University Research Ethics Board. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author contributions

MT: writing, editing, recruiting participants, creating materials and survey, constructing measures, main data analyses, methodology and statistical analyses plan, power analyses, and theoretical background. YT: editing, recruiting participants, creating materials, focus group, and minor data analyses. SW: editing, methodology and statistical analyses plan, creation of materials, theoretical background. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This research was funded by a CGS-M SSHRC and SPSSI Clara Mayo grant awarded to the corresponding author.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge that this research was – in part – conducted on stolen territory belonging to the Coast Salish Nations, specifically the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̍ilw̍ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), kʷikʷəƛ̍əm (Kwikwetlem), and q̍icə̍y̍ (Katzie) Nations, on which Simon Fraser University lies. We would also like to acknowledge that this research was funded by a CGS-M SSHRC and SPSSI Clara Mayo grant awarded to the corresponding author and that this research was conducted as a master’s thesis project which can be found on the Simon Fraser University Library website at: https://sfuprimo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/usv8m3/01SFUL_ALMA51445265030003611 .

1 Participants who spent less than 500 s on the survey had more incomplete data and tended to select the same scale values throughout (e.g., selecting five for every item). Participants who spent longer than 7,200 s on the survey were more likely to spend long periods of time on one page with questions that should only have taken minutes to complete, indicating that they may have left the survey open to complete other tasks and come back to it later.

2 See Supplementary materials for EFA.

3 No participant spent more than 7,200 s.

4 osf.io/qftn8

5 See Supplementary materials for EFA.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1181872/full#supplementary-material

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A Different Way of Thinking About Cancel Culture

Social media companies and other organizations are looking out for themselves.

By Ezra Klein

Opinion Columnist

In March, Alexi McCammond, the newly hired editor of Teen Vogue, resigned following backlash over offensive tweets she’d sent a decade ago, beginning when she was 17. In January, Will Wilkinson lost his job as vice president for research at the center-right Niskanen Center for a satirical tweet about Republicans who wanted to hang Mike Pence. (Wilkinson was also suspended from his role as a Times Opinion contributor.)

To debate whether these punishments were fair is to commit a category error. These weren’t verdicts weighed and delivered on behalf of society. These were the actions of self-interested organizations that had decided their employees were now liabilities. Teen Vogue, which is part of Condé Nast, has remade itself in recent years as a leftist magazine built around anti-racist principles. Niskanen trades on its perceived clout with elected Republicans. In both cases, the organization was trying to protect itself, for its own reasons.

That suggests a different way of thinking about the amorphous thing we call cancel culture, and a more useful one. Cancellations — defined here as actually losing your job or your livelihood — occur when an employee’s speech infraction generates public attention that threatens an employer’s profits, influence or reputation. This isn’t an issue of “wokeness,” as anyone who has been on the business end of a right-wing mob trying to get them or their employees fired — as I have, multiple times — knows. It’s driven by economics, and the key actors are social media giants and employers who really could change the decisions they make in ways that would lead to a better speech climate for us all.

[ Listen to The Ezra Klein Show, a podcast about ideas that matter .]

Boundaries on acceptable speech aren’t new, and they’re not narrower today than in the past. Remember the post-9/11 furor over whether you could run for office if you didn’t wear an American flag pin at all times? What is new is the role social media (and, to a lesser extent, digital news) plays in both focusing outrage and scaring employers. And this, too, is a problem of economics, not culture. Social platforms and media publishers want to attract people to their websites or shows and make sure they come back. They do this, in part, by tuning the platforms and home pages and story choices to surface content that outrages the audience.

My former Times colleague Charlie Warzel, in his new newsletter , points to Twitter’s trending box as an example of how this works, and it’s a good one if you want to see the hidden hand of technology and corporate business models in what we keep calling a cultural problem. This box is where Twitter curates its sprawling conversation, directing everyone who logs on to topics drawing unusual interest at the moment. Oftentimes that’s someone who said something stupid, or offensive — or even someone who said something innocuous only to have it misread as stupid or offensive.

The trending box blasts missives meant for one community to all communities. The original context for the tweet collapses; whatever generosity or prior knowledge the intended audience might have brought to the interaction is lost. The loss of context is supercharged by another feature of the platform: the quote-tweet, where instead of answering in the original conversation, you pull the tweet out of its context and write something cutting on top of it. (A crummier version comes when people just screenshot a tweet, so the audience can’t even click back to the original, or see the possible apology.) So the trending box concentrates attention on a particular person, already having a bad day, and the quote-tweet function encourages people to carve up the message for their own purposes.

This is not just a problem of social media platforms. Watch Fox News for a night, and you’ll see a festival of stories elevating some random local excess to national attention and inflicting terrible pain on the people who are targeted. Fox isn’t anti-cancel culture; it just wants to be the one controlling that culture.

Cancellations are sometimes intended, and deserved. Some speech should have consequences. But many of the people who participate in the digital pile-ons that lead to cancellation don’t want to cancel anybody. They’re just joining in that day’s online conversation. They’re criticizing an offensive or even dangerous idea, mocking someone they think deserves it, hunting for retweets, demanding accountability, making a joke. They aren’t trying to get anyone fired. But collectively, they do get someone fired.

In all these cases, the economics of corporations that monetize attention are colliding with the incentives of employers to avoid bad publicity. One structural way social media has changed corporate management is that it has made P.R. problems harder to ignore. Outrage that used to play out relatively quietly, through letters and emails and phone calls, now plays out in public. Hasty meetings get called, senior executives get pulled in, and that’s when people get fired.

An even more sinister version of this operates retrospectively, through search results. An employer considering a job candidate does a basic Google search, finds an embarrassing controversy from three years ago and quietly moves on to the next candidate. Wokeness has particular economic power right now because corporations, correctly, don’t want to be seen as racist and homophobic, but imagine how social media would have supercharged the censorious dynamics that dominated right after 9/11, when even french fries were suspected of disloyalty.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, the sociologist and cultural critic, made a great point to me about this on a recent podcast . “One of the problems right now is that social shame, which I think in and of itself is enough, usually, to discipline most people, is now tied to economic and political and cultural capital,” she said.

People should be shamed when they say something awful. Social sanctions are an important mechanism for social change, and they should be used. The problem is when that one awful thing someone said comes to define their online identity, and then it defines their future economic and political and personal opportunities. I don’t like the line that no one deserves to be defined by the worst thing they’ve ever done — tell me the body count first — but let’s agree that most of us don’t deserve to be defined by the dumbest thing we’ve ever said, forever, just because Google’s algorithm noticed that that moment got more links than the rest of our life combined.

I think this suggests a few ways to make online discourse better. Twitter should rethink its trending box, and at least consider the role quote-tweets play on the platform. (It would be easy enough to retain them as a function while throttling their virality.) Fox News should stop being, well, Fox News. All of the social media platforms need to think about the way their algorithms juice outrage and supercharge the human tendency to police group boundaries.

For months, when I logged onto Facebook, I saw the posts of a distant acquaintance who had turned into an anti-masker, and whose comment threads had turned into flame wars. This wasn’t someone I was close to, but the algorithm knew that what was being posted was generating a lot of angry reaction among our mutual friends, and it repeatedly tried to get me to react, too. These are design choices that are making society more toxic. Different choices can, and should, be made.

The rest of corporate America — and that includes my own industry — needs to think seriously about how severe a punishment it is to fire people under public conditions. When termination is for private misdeeds or poor performance, it typically stays private. When it is for something the internet is outraged about, it can shatter someone’s economic prospects for years to come. It’s always hard, from the outside, to evaluate any individual case, but I’ve seen a lot of firings that probably should have been suspensions or scoldings.

This also raises the question of our online identities, and the way strange and unexpected moments come to define them. A person’s Google results can shape the rest of that person’s life, both economically and otherwise. And yet people have almost no control over what’s shown in those results, unless they have the money to hire a firm that specializes in rehabilitating online reputations. This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but our lifelong digital identities are too important to be left to the terms and conditions of a single company, or even a few.

Finally, it would be better to focus on cancel behavior than cancel culture. There is no one ideology that gleefully mobs or targets employers online. Plenty of anti-cancel culture warriors get their retweets directing their followers to mob others. So here’s a guideline that I think would make online discourse better. Unless something that is said is truly dangerous and you actually want to see that person fired from their current job and potentially unable to find a new one — a high bar, but one that is sometimes met — you shouldn’t use social media to join an ongoing pile-on against a normal person. If it’s a politician or a cable news host or a senator, well, that’s politics. But this works differently when it’s someone unprepared for that scrutiny. We would all do better to remember that what feels like an offhand tweet to us could have real consequences for others if there are hundreds or thousands of similar tweets and articles. Scale matters.

What I’m offering here would, I hope, help ease a specific problem: the disproportionate and capricious economic punishments meted out in the aftermath of an online pile-on. It won’t end the political conflict over acceptable speech, nor should it. There have always been things we cannot say in polite society, and those things are changing, in overdue ways. The balance of demographic power is shifting, and groups that had little voice in the language and ordering of the national agenda are gaining that voice and using it.

Slowly and painfully, we are creating a society in which more people can speak and have some say over how they’re spoken of. What I hope we can do is keep that fight from serving the business models of social media platforms and the shifting priorities of corporate marketing departments.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor-at-large of Vox; the host of the podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. @ ezraklein

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Cancel culture can be collectively validating for groups experiencing harm.

• Intergroup Relations and Social Justice Lab, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

Introduction: Social psychological research on collective action and intergroup harm has yet to adequately consider the potential role of cancel culture or feelings of collective validation in motivating collective action. The current research will begin to fill this gap and may broaden our understanding of the psychological mechanisms that inspire and maintain collective action in response to intergroup harm. To our knowledge, this research is the first social psychological analysis of the impact of cancel culture on collective action and as means for producing feelings of collective validation.

Methods: In two experimental studies, participants read a story describing an event of discrimination against their group followed by a manipulation of the presence or absence of an episode of cancel culture. Study 1 samples woman university students ( N = 520) and focuses on their responses to a sexist incident on campus. Study 2 (pre-registered) assesses the generality of the model in a racism context with a community sample of East Asian Canadians and Americans ( N = 237).

Results: Study 1 showed that an episode of cancel culture had an indirect positive effect on collective action intentions mediated by feelings of collective validation and collective empowerment. Study 2 showed the indirect effect of cancel culture on collective action intentions mediated by feelings of collective validation and collective anger and contempt.

Discussion: The current research offers a novel theoretical and empirical introduction to the concept of collective validation and the understudied context of cancel culture to the existing social psychological research and theory on collective action. Further, cancel culture has been criticized as problematic. However, this perspective centres those in positions of power. Through this research, we hope to shift the focus onto marginalized groups’ perspectives of episodes of cancel culture. This research shows that groups who experience harm find these episodes of cancel culture validating in ways that have yet to be fully explored by intergroup relations research. Further, these findings suggest that collective validation does mediate the relationship between cancel culture and collective action; thus, cancel culture becomes an important contributor to resistance by marginalized groups through collective validation.

Introduction

Cancel culture involves the highly visible calling for and enacting of boycotts, condemnation, and social exiling of a person or group whose harmful behaviours or attitudes have been deemed unacceptable, offensive, or inappropriate. While predominately online, the practice of cancelling and cancel culture predates the internet and has its foundations in Black liberation and protest. Anne Charity Hudley, chair of linguistics of African America for the University of California Santa Barbara, states,

[w]hile the terminology of cancel culture may be new and most applicable to social media through Black Twitter, in particular, the concept of being canceled is not new to Black culture [… cancelling is] a survival skill as old as the Southern black use of the boycott (from Romano, 2020 ) .

She likens cancel culture to protest and boycott of people and groups, rather than businesses, and describes cancel culture as a way to empower those whose voices are marginalized; “ it’s a collective way of saying, ‘We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] we are not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you’ ” (quote from Romano, 2020 ).

However, cancel culture has been criticized by some as more problematic than helpful ( Ronson, 2016 ; Hagi, 2019 ; Romano, 2020 ; see also Drury, 2002 for reactionary crowds). Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) advocate and social media influencer, Beecham (2021) argues that while the goal of cancel culture is to combat prejudice, in practice it often redirects prejudice to a new target through “us vs. them” thinking. Beecham’s argument implies a singular goal of cancel culture as combatting prejudice and claims that cancel culture is ineffective in achieving this goal. It seems hasty to claim that cancel culture’s only goal – or main goal – is to combat prejudice, and conclusions about the overall value of this social practice are premature without first considering a wider range of possible goals and impacts, especially the impacts on those who have been harmed and are speaking up. This is not to say that Beecham has neglected to consider the impacts of cancel culture on harmed groups, or that all her critiques of cancel culture are or erroneous – many have merit. Rather, we propose that cancel culture, whether effective at reducing prejudice or not, may reduce the impact of harm and/or elicit other productive forms of collective action. Harmed groups may benefit from the support, validation, and visibility from others who are involved in cancelling perpetrators of harm. That is, an episode of cancel culture might provide the conditions for the harmed group to experience feelings of collective validation that, in turn, could increase feelings of empowerment that inspire or maintain collective action.

To our knowledge, this research is the first social psychological analysis of the impact of cancel culture on collective action. In addition, research on collective action in response to intergroup harm has yet to adequately consider the role of feelings of collective validation as a motivator of collective action. The current research will begin to fill this gap and in so doing may broaden our understanding of the psychological mechanisms that inspire and maintain collective responses to intergroup harm.

Feelings of collective validation

Validation is typically understood as the recognition and affirmation of a person’s experiences and an affirmation of their feelings as legitimate. In clinical trauma therapy, practitioners have successfully used validation to support patient wellbeing and have identified feelings of validation as an important and necessary component of recovery and healing following harm (e.g., Hong and Lishner, 2016 ; Özeke-Kocabaş and Üstündağ-Budak, 2017 ). However, this research focuses on the psychopathology of trauma and practitioners’ use of trauma validation to support individual clients in interpersonal contexts. To develop the concept of intergroup validation, it may be valuable to consider group-based harm (discrimination, harassment, oppression, etc.) as trauma ( Carter, 2007 ). Thus, the concept of validation might also be useful when understanding and thinking about responses to intergroup harm.

Discussions and investigations of validation within social psychological literature are scant, but there are a few. Kalkhoff (2005) describes collective validation as occurring when “ bystanders copy or refrain from challenging a lower-status actor’s deference to a higher-status actor [or] validate deferential behavior collectively by pressuring a recalcitrant lower-status actor to defer to a higher-status counterpart ” (p. 59). More simply, Kalkhoff is suggesting that the behaviours of bystanders validate social norms within groups by pressuring lower-status members to conform or by refraining from challenging the submission of those with lower-status. However, this use of group validation focuses on intra group relations, where members of a single group validate the actions of their own group members. Contrastingly, collective validation as an intergroup phenomenon would involve the feeling that one’s group and its experiences have been recognized and validated by members of other groups. Additionally, Kalkhoff’s definition describes only how validation can further marginalize those of “lower-status” and fails to recognize that validation might also occur where a “lower-status” group challenges a “higher- status” group – members of other groups may validate the harmed group, recognize the illegitimacy of the harm, and even join them to challenge the actions of the perpetrator group and demand reparations. Therefore, we can extend Kalkhoff’s conceptualization of collective validation by examining group-based harm where the harmed group challenges the perpetrator’s behaviour and demands justice.

An interesting and relevant example of validation is present in Foster et al.’s (2021) research on women’s expectations of validation from others for engaging in online collective action. They found that when women expected greater validation for their social media activism, they showed more interest in future collective action. However, validation in Foster and colleagues’ work focused on experiences of personal validation (validation of me as a person – likable, friendly, etc.). In addition, this work focuses on expectations that one will be validated for future actions. Here, we hope to expand on this by focusing specifically on actual experienced feelings of collective validation (the feeling that one’s group is being validated).

Interestingly, collective validation of group-based harm is also briefly described in the literature on collective apologies (e.g., Hornsey and Wohl, 2013 ), where recognition of a group’s continued suffering and commitment to redress by the perpetrator group are seen as essential to an effective apology. An effective apology should offer this kind of validation. However, while a collective apology offers validation of a group’s suffering and their responses to that suffering, we propose that collective validation following harm may be sought from groups other than the perpetrators – from a wider range of agents, including ingroup members and especially members of the superordinate category (see Turner et al., 1987 ) – the larger, more inclusive group that includes the harmed group, the perpetrator group, and other groups. Thus, although the validation offered by perpetrators through apologies may be important, validation by third party groups may also be particularly valuable.

Harmed groups receiving support from a third party is also explored by Simon and Klandermans’ (2001) triangular model of politicized collective identity. This model proposes three steps that lead harmed group members to become politicized and act against harm. First, group members become aware of the harm and agree that it is unwanted (awareness of shared grievances). Next, they identify an adversary to whom they attribute the harm (adversarial attribution). If this adversary does not address their harmful behaviours, the harmed group seeks to connect with members of the broader society to gain support. Although Simon and Klandermans do not explicitly consider that the participation of third parties can serve as validation, they do consider other consequences for this recruitment of a third party, such as structuring of the understanding of the conflict as one including opponents and potential allies, rather than “ bipolar in-group/out-group confrontation ” (p. 328). This broadens the meaning of collective action to include both actions aimed at opponents (or perpetrators) and action aimed at recruiting third party allies. This implies that the contributions of other groups (third parties) are desirable and valuable to disadvantaged group members. We propose that one reason for this is that third parties offer not only a strategic advantage but also psychological validation of the ingroup and its struggle. In addition, Simon and Klandermans’ ideas map nicely onto the context of cancel culture, where members of other groups within the larger society join in the action and thus evidence themselves as potential allies with the harmed group.

Finally, most discussions of validation describe validation in terms of the actions of those who are providing validation. Thus, validation is conceptualised in terms of the behaviours of others that are intended to create the conditions for members of the harmed group to feel validated . However, these behaviours may or may not produce these feelings. Thus, any action by others is only validating to the degree that the harmed group experiences it as such. Therefore, we propose that collective validation is more aptly understood as the psychological experience of those who are targeted. Thus, the current research centers the psychological experience of the harmed group by describing and measuring collective validation as the feelings of those who have been harmed.

Cancel culture and feelings of collective validation

Okimoto and Wenzel (2008) describe how intergroup transgressions can threaten the status and power equilibrium and also threaten the validity of common values that the victim group expects are shared across the superordinate category (their community or society). The kinds of transgressions that lead to episodes of cancel culture often involve acts that threaten the victim group’s status, power and autonomy/control over their reputation (e.g., a sexist comment threatens the status and diminishes the power and autonomy of all women in that context). This is especially salient in intergroup relations where the status of the offending group may come at the expense the harmed group. Simultaneously, values the victim believes are shared broadly within society are also violated, threatening the validity of these values (e.g., the victim believes that society values women and sexist comments violate, and thus call into question, the general support of that value). According to Okimoto and Wenzel (2008) , a response to this injustice would need to address both concerns if justice is to be restored. We propose that both concerns may be partially addressed by an episode of cancel culture. When a perpetrator is “called out” for their offensive actions, they are given the opportunity to take responsibility, apologise, and restore justice. However, if the perpetrator refuses, the harmed group calls on the superordinate group – society – for justice. By isolating, humiliating, and diminishing the status of the offender, cancel culture involves the superordinate group communicating to the harmed group that their status, and autonomy over their reputation, and the importance of the shared values that had been violated by the offending group are indeed secure. Therefore, cancel culture offers to the harmed group the objective conditions that may lead to feelings of collective validation, through high visibility (e.g., amplifying the voices of harmed group members), public denouncing of social norm violation (i.e., “ we agree that the sexist comment violates a norm ”), punishment of the perpetrators and calls for justice (i.e., through cancelling and public shame), and explicit support for the harmed group (e.g., “ we believe, see, hear, and agree with you ”).

Thus, cancelling of the offending group may provide the conditions that lead members of the harmed group to feel validated through the participation of the superordinate group in reaffirming and recognizing the harmed group’s status and power, and restoring shared values in defense of the harmed group. In part this is done by increasing the visibility of the offense while simultaneously decreasing the visibility of the offender, and by increasing the visibility of the harmed group’s response to the offense, thus amplifying the voices of marginalised groups.

This process reflects Banet-Weiser’s (2018) claim that online societies function through an inequality of power, where power is embodied through visibility and attention and often politicized and commodified. Attention – in the form of likes, shares, and trending hashtags – becomes a means to promote specific online content following the same socioeconomic politics of power as the offline world. When actions challenge deeper systems of oppression and power, they become undesirable and are less likely to attract attention. Banet-Weiser explains that many popular and commodified online feminist movements, for example, fail to “ challenge deep structures of inequalities ” (p. 11) and this failure makes them more palatable to those in power and, consequently, leads them to be more visible. Additionally, “for some images and practices to become visible, others [those that do challenge deep structures of inequalities] must be rendered invisible” (p. 11). Cancelling a perpetrator group or its members can, at times, amplify and make more visible harmed and marginalized groups.

Thus, visibility may be key in inspiring feelings of collective validation as it offers public recognition and the possibility that others will also affirm the suffering caused by intergroup harm. Therefore, this research uses the context of cancel culture as one that could inspire feelings of collective validation after group-based harm because it includes the following:

a. It is provided by members of a superordinate group

b. It directly recognizes that harm was done to a particular group

c. It explicitly affirms the harmed group’s emotional responses to that harm

d. It supports and amplifies the harmed group in challenging the perpetrator group’s actions and in demanding justice

e. It has high public visibility

Even when limited and sporadic, episodes of cancel culture may have positive influences on social change through amplifying the harmed group’s voices, by temporarily canceling powerful and harmful voices, and by raising the visibility of marginalized groups. This explicit recognition and support (i.e., validation) of a harmed group may allow them to recognize their collective power (i.e., feeling of collective empowerment) and thus motivate continued efforts for social change. Therefore, we propose that one way that cancel culture can influence subsequent actions is through the resulting experience (or subjective feeling) of collective validation and its subsequent impact on feelings of collective empowerment.

Collective empowerment and collective action

We propose that experiencing validation following harm can play an important role in building the sense of collective empowerment that is critical for members of disadvantaged groups to initiate, join, and continue their involvement in collective action directed at social change (e.g., Drury and Reicher, 1999 ). Rappaport (1987) defines collective empowerment as the phenomenon or process of being able or allowed to do something because there is control or authority over that thing. Similarly, Wright (2010) conceptualises perceived collective control as comprised of two beliefs: “( 1 ) that social change is contingent upon behavior (i.e. , that the situation is modifiable ) and (2) that [ a person’s ] group in particular can execute the behaviors necessary to produce the desired change ” (p.864; see also Zimmerman and Rappaport, 1988 ).

Both representations of empowerment support the contention that collective empowerment includes two components. One is the belief that one’s group has the power to influence the social environment. However, one cannot experience these feelings of efficacy or power if one first does not first perceive the social environment as malleable to influence. That is, one must first perceive “instability” ( Tajfel and Turner, 1979 ) in the current social environment. Therefore, collective empowerment involves perceptions of instability and collective efficacy. Thus, while collective validation is the feeling that one’s group’s experiences – especially with harm – are recognised, valued, and affirmed by a superordinate group, collective empowerment is the feeling that the social environment that generated harm can be changed (instability) and that one’s group has the power and means to change it (efficacy).

Thus, if experiencing collective validation serves to heighten feelings of empowerment – then cancel culture may lead marginalized groups to engage in collective efforts to achieve social change indirectly through the psychological mechanisms of feelings of collective validation and collective empowerment.

Collective emotions and collective action

In addition to recognizing and condemning the harm done to the group, cancel culture might also offer legitimacy to collective emotions such as anger and contempt. Thus, the feeling of validation that results from an episode of cancel culture could also include the sense that one’s strong negative emotions about perpetrators of harm are appropriate, which in turn may strengthen the expression of emotions that are well-documented to provide one the psychological foundation for collective action – outgroup-directed anger and contempt. For example, Stürmer and Simon (2009) found that anger was a direct predictor of collective action as it provided an avenue for participants to relieve aggressive tension. Similarly, van Zomeren et al. (2008a) identify group-based anger as a unique pathway to collective action (see also Tausch et al., 2011 ; van Zomeren et al., 2012 ; van Zomeren, 2013 ) describing how “emotional social support validates the group-based appraisal of [an] event, which also affirms emotional responses like anger” ( van Zomeren et al., 2004 , p. 650). However, few of these studies focus on the combination of anger and contempt.

Anger and contempt are distinct, yet highly related emotions. Mackie et al. (2000) argue that anger – which is the emotional evaluation of someone’s actions – is related to “action tendencies against the triggering agent” (p. 610) or attack behaviours (e.g., violence, arguing). Contempt is the emotional evaluation of someone’s worth and is related to exclusionary actions (e.g., avoidance or exiling behaviour). Groups that are traditionally marginalized by oppressive systems may feel contempt for perpetrator groups following incidents of harm because of the long history of attempts to address injustices with little success. Simultaneously, these harmed groups might still hope for an end to oppression – which requires cooperation from perpetrator groups – and, thus, being angry or frustrated with the perpetrator groups for their lack of cooperation in resolving conflict.

Evident in most episodes of cancel culture is the presence of both anger and contempt where participants engage in both attack and exclusionary actions simultaneously. The act of attacking someone’s reputation is an anger response. Social exiling of perpetrators is a contempt response to unacceptable behaviour. This mixture of anger and contempt make cancel culture an interesting example of intergroup conflict.

Further, the participation of superordinate group members in cancelling of the perpetrators may communicate to the harmed group that their emotional responses of both anger and contempt are reasonable, merited, and valid. The resulting feeling of validation of one’s anger and contempt on behalf of their group’s experience may serve to increase these emotions, which should in turn increase their likelihood of engaging in collective action. Therefore, this current research will assess whether the subjective feelings of validation that emerges as a result of an episode of cancel culture also enhance anger and contempt which should lead to greater willingness to engage in collective action.

Theoretical model

This theorizing results in a sequential mediational model that proposes that, following collective harm, an episode of cancel culture should elicit feelings of collective validation in the harmed group. This experience of collective validation strengthens feeling of both collective empowerment and the collective emotions of anger and contempt, which in turn lead to stronger intentions to engage in collective action. Thus, it is predicted that an episode of cancel culture will have indirect positive impacts on collective anger and contempt, feelings of collective empowerment, and collective action that are mediated by feelings of collective validation.

The current research

Two experimental studies test the model presented in Figure 1 . Study 1 uses a university student sample and focuses on the responses of women to a blatantly sexist incident on campus. Study 2 uses a community sample of East Asian Canadians and Americans and focuses on an episode of cancel culture in response to an act of anti-East Asian discrimination.

Figure 1 . Theoretical mediation model.

In both studies it is expected that being exposed to an episode of cancel culture, versus a control condition, will increase collective action intentions and behaviours. This effect will be sequentially mediated first by feelings of collective validation, followed by both collective anger and contempt and collective empowerment (see Figure 1 ). We do not have a priori predictions about a direct pathway between the manipulation of cancel culture and collective anger and contempt or between the manipulation of cancel culture and collective empowerment.

Study 1: sexism and university women

Participants.

Data were collected between October 2021 and March 2022. Cases were removed if participants did not complete the survey (133 cases), spent less than 500 s (approximately 8 min; 17 cases), or spent more than 7,200 s (120 min; 65 cases) on the survey. 1 Finally, repeating cases were removed (20 cases). The final sample, after removing problematic cases (e.g., nonconsenting, repeated submissions, etc.), consisted of 520 university women. Demographic information is listed in Table 1 .

Table 1 . Summary of participant demographics (Study 1).

University women were recruited online using the Psychology Department’s Research Participation System (RPS). Participants were told that the researchers were “ interested in understanding perceptions of community responses to contentious incidents and topics in campus environments .” Those who signed up for the study were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In both conditions, participants read a fictitious scenario of a sexist incident on campus. In the cancel culture condition this incident was followed by a description of a highly visible episode of cancel culture against the perpetrator group. In the control condition, the incident was followed by some filler/neutral information about unrelated activities on campus.

Following exposure to the given condition, participants responded to measures of feelings of collective validation, collective empowerment, anger, contempt, and collective action intentions.

Cancel culture condition

The cancel culture condition included a scenario describing a sexist incident on campus (modeled on a real event at Texas Tech University; see Barbato, 2014 ; Servantes, 2014 ) followed by a description of a targeted campaign by others from the community to cancel a fictitious fraternity (e.g., #EndEtaNu). The episode of cancel culture includes components naturally found in real-world cancel culture scenarios such as high visibility (“ […] the post had 200 likes and has been shared over 30 times by the university community and beyond ”), public denouncing of norm violation (“ women on campus have every right to be pissed ”), punishment of the perpetrators (“ Two Eta Nu members […] fired from a co-op position and […] suspended from the swim team ”) and calls for justice (“ A petition […] calling for the removal of Eta Nu chapter and already has over 1,500 signatures in less than a week ”), and objective support of the harmed group (“ this is hurtful and has very real consequences for women on campus ”).

Control condition

The control condition included the sexist incident on campus scenario, but the description of the campaign to cancel the fraternity was replaced with filler information about other homecoming incidents unrelated to the sexist incident or to issues of gender or sexism more generally (e.g., vandalism and littering, a student getting stuck on top of a residence building).

This measure was constructed for this study.

Participants responded to 24 items consistent with the definition of subjective or felt collective validation previously outlined (e.g., “ Experiences of harm faced by women are recognized by the university community ”) on a 7-point scale (1 Strongly disagree to 7 Strongly agree ). Higher scores indicate greater felt collective validation ( α =0 .79). See Appendix A . 2

Collective anger and contempt

Participants responded to 8 items measuring anger and contempt ( Mackie et al., 2000 ). They reported the extent to which they felt angry, displeased, irritated, furious, contemptuous, disgusted, repelled, and sick on 5-point scales (1 Not at all to 5 Extremely ). Higher scores indicate greater reported feelings of anger and contempt ( α =0.94). While Mackie et al. use two separate measures for anger and contempt, this study uses one since Mackie et al. found a high correlation between the two emotions, which was mirrored in these data ( r = 0.86).

Collective empowerment

Our initial conceptualization of empowerment research included perceived instability and collective efficacy. However, our 3-item measure of perceived instability of the relationship between the perpetrator group and harmed group adapted from Mummendey et al. (1999) and Wright et al. (2020) had very low reliability ( α = 0.56) and including it undermined the reliability of our measure of collective empowerment. Thus, these three items were not included, and the overall final measure of collective empowerment included two scales.

The second was a 5-item measure of collective efficacy adapted from Sabherwal et al. (2021) . Participants rated how likely “ Women on campus, working together, can influence the following groups to do something about gender-based violence on campus ”: (a) the federal government, (b) the provincial government, (c) the local government, (d) university administrators, and (e) fraternity leaders on 7-point scales (1 Not at all to 7 Extremely ). Higher scores indicate greater perceived collective efficacy ( α = 0.85).

The third measure was a more general measure of empowerment that included 4 items measuring women’s feelings of strength, control, and power (e.g., “ I feel that women on campus are strong ”) on a 7-point agreement scale (1 Strongly disagree to 7 Strongly agree ). Higher scores indicate greater feelings of empowerment ( α = 0.81).

The collective efficacy and general empowerment measures were aggregated to provide a single collective empowerment score with higher scores indicating greater feelings of empowerment ( α = 0.80).

Collective action intentions

Participants responded to 10 items measuring their willingness to participate in various forms of anti-sexism activism (e.g., “ I would participate in a rally demanding equal salaries for men and women ”; “ I would act against sexism in general ”) on 7-point scales (1 Very unlikely to 7 Very likely ). This measure was adapted from Becker and Wright (2011) for use in a 2022 Canadian Context (e.g., “ I would donate for a women’s organization which lobbies for women’s rights, such as Terres des femmes ” was changed to “ I would donate to an organization that advocates for women’s rights, such as Canadian Women’s Foundation ”). Higher scores indicate stronger intentions to participate in collective action ( α = 0.92).

Predicted mediational analyses

The hypothesised model using the measure of Collective Action Intentions as the dependent variable was assessed using SPSS PROCESS Model 81 ( Hayes, 2022 ).

Condition (cancel culture vs. control) had a significant direct effect on Feelings of Collective Validation, which also had a significant direct effect on Collective Empowerment. Collective Empowerment had a significant direct effect on Collective Action Intention. The direct effect of Condition on Collective Action Intentions was not significant, and the only significant indirect effect of Condition on Collective Action Intention was a sequential mediation through both Feelings of Collective Validation and Collective Empowerment [ β = 0.03, 95% CI (0.01, 0.05)]. The causal steps approach to mediational analyses (see Baron and Kenny, 1986 ) held that a direct effect of the independent variable on the final outcome variable (or the total effect) should be a “gatekeeper” to mediational analyses. However, more recent statisticians have argued against this approach ( Shrout and Bolger, 2002 ; Hayes, 2009 ) and have suggested using bootstrapping to test for indirect effects ( MacKinnon et al., 2004 ). This bootstrapping method is the approach taken in Hayes SPSS PROCESS Macro ( Hayes, 2022 ) that was used for these analyses. Therefore, these results suggest the need to consider other possible pathways between Condition and Collective Action Intentions that were not included in this model ( Table 2 ).

Table 2 . Correlation matrix for all variables.

The predicted direct effect of Feelings of Collective Validation on Collective Emotions was non-significant and thus the sequential indirect effect of Condition on Collective Action Intentions mediated by Feelings of Collective Validation and Collective Emotions was non-significant ( β = −0.00, 95% CI (−0.01, 0.01)). However, the direct effect of Collective Emotions on Collective Action Intentions was significant. See Table 3 and Figure 2 for details of these direct effects.

Table 3 . Direct effects of predicted model 81.

This first experimental study provides initial evidence that being exposed to an episode of cancel culture does elicit feelings of collective validation and these feelings are associated with a stronger sense of collective empowerment which in turn is associated with greater collective action intention. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a positive relationship between exposure to cancel culture and intentions to engage in collective action has been demonstrated using an experimental design. However, the correlation between Condition and Collective Action Intentions is small (−0.01), implying the possible presence of other pathways in the total model. Regardless, despite legitimate critiques of cancel culture and a recognition that, like cancel culture itself, these effects may be limited in time and scope, it does appear cancel culture in response to a blatant act of sexism can have a positive impact on women’s interest in taking actions to fight gender inequality.

Collective empowerment and feelings of collective validation

While collective – and personal – empowerment has been linked to greater collective action in previous work ( Drury and Reicher, 1999 ; van Zomeren et al., 2008b ; Wright, 2010 ), this research provides preliminary support for the role of collective validation as a precursor for women’s sense of collective empowerment and, thus, intentions to participate in collective action. Therefore, future research on motivating factors for collective action may benefit from the inclusion of feelings of collective validation and consider sources of this validation (e.g., cancel culture). It is also possible that instances of allyship such as cancel culture elicit collective validation of a group’s existing power through communicating collective care and, thus, group value (i.e., “ we care about your wellbeing and experiences with harm because you matter ”; e.g., Smith, 1997 ; Weis et al., 2006 ; Bradbury-Jones et al., 2011 ). This is not to say that cancel culture should be used to motivate groups toward collective action, rather it serves as an interesting and important example of allyship from a superordinate group that may, through collective validation (i.e., recognition, support, and increased visibility) of a harmed group, foster the collective empowerment needed to motivate groups toward collective action.

Emotions and feelings of collective validation

Consistent with previous research (e.g., Stürmer and Simon, 2009 ; Tausch et al., 2011 ; Shepherd and Evans, 2020 ), stronger feelings of anger and contempt were associated with stronger collective action intentions. However, this relationship seems to be separate from cancel culture and feelings of collective validation. One may argue that the collective validation that emerges from cancel culture may alleviate feelings of anger and contempt. However, the women in the current study were substantially angry and contemptuous ( x̄ =4.43, SD = 0.71, on a 5-point scale). Hence, two other possible explanations for this finding are that (1) emotions constitute a pathway toward collective action that is separate from collective validation and that these emotions are more influenced by the nature of the harmful/unjust actions of the perpetrator group than by the subsequent responses to those actions and (2) there is a difference between affective social support and instrumental social support present in this research.

van Zomeren et al. (2008a) social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) proposes three distinct predictors of collective action: affective justice (emotional responses to perceived injustice – such as anger); politicized identity; and collective efficacy. Therefore, it is possible that collective anger and contempt are motivating collective action intention for reasons separate from feelings of collective validation.

In addition, according to van Zomeren et al. (2004) , emotional social support (support of the harmed group’s emotions and opinions) influenced collective action through collective anger, whereas instrumental social support (direct action by a superordinate group to correct the injustice) influenced collective action through collective efficacy (see also van Zomeren et al., 2008a affective vs. nonaffective injustice). Therefore, it is also possible that the cancel culture scenario presented in the current research elicited a sense of instrumental social support more so than emotional social support resulting in the lack of a relationship between feelings of collective validation and collective anger and contempt. For example, the campus community petitioning administration to expel the perpetrators and enact consequences for the Eta Nu fraternity may have been viewed by participants as instrumental collective validation (or social support) since these examples represent public actions.

Improvements for study 2

Study 2 will extend the current findings with three important changes from Study 1. First, we will test the generality of the findings by focusing on a different intergroup relationship. Thus, Study 2, includes a community sample of East Asian Canadians and Americans and focuses on responses to an incident of Anti-Asian discrimination. Second, in order to better consider the impact of emotions as mediators, the scenario presenting the manipulation will include more messages that reflect affective responses ( van Zomeren et al., 2004 ). Third, to streamline the data collection, the 2-part measure of collective empowerment used in Study 1 will be replaced by a simpler, more direct measure ( Moya-Garófano et al., 2021 ).

Study 2: anti-East Asian racism

Incidents of violence and anti-East Asian hate crimes are on the rise following the 2020 COVID-19 outbreaks ( Chen et al., 2020 ). In addition, the East Asian diaspora is beginning to speak openly about this xenophobia and racism. Prior to these recent events, racism toward East Asian Canadians and Americans has typically been marginalised and downplayed, at times even by East Asian communities (e.g., Tai, 2020 ; Shao and Lin, 2021 ). This may be in part due to the Model Minority Myth (MMM) that minimises and marginalizes East Asian communities and groups’ experiences with racism since they are viewed as passive, privileged, successful and even as “honorary whites” who do not complain or protest like other systemically marginalised groups ( Aguirre and Lio, 2008 ; Yoo et al., 2010 ; Lee, 2022 ). Thus, East Asian peoples may fear that drawing attention to themselves via collective action against anti-East Asian racism might result in backlash and more racist discrimination, rather than support or solidarity, from the dominant groups that endorse the MMM. Wei et al. (2010) found that Asian American women who endorsed direct confrontations of gender discrimination reported more negative outcomes including decreased life satisfaction. While the MMM has received considerable academic and public critique, it remains a common representation of East Asian communities in both the US and Canada. The resulting lack of public attention has also led to limited attention from social psychological and anti-racism research. However, anti-Asian racism has been rampant in North America for decades, and there is growing public discourse and activism ( Brockell, 2021 ; Government of Canada, 2021 ; Lee, 2022 ). Therefore, a focus on anti- East Asian discrimination and collective responses to it are both important and timely. Thus, we will use this context to explore the role of cancel culture, feelings of collective validation, emotions, and collective empowerment in motivating collective action.

Focus group

Prior to beginning the study, the second author conducted a focus group with East Asian Canadian students. The rationale was to include members of East Asian communities early in the research process as we were developing the content of the manipulations and adapting the measures to this new intergroup context. It was important that the scenarios and measures be respectful of East Asian cultures, perspectives, experiences, and communities. The specific goal of the focus group was to gauge how East Asian students responded to an early draft of the scenarios used in the manipulation and to use their feedback to make alterations. In addition, it was important that the list of potential collective actions was culturally relevant (e.g., would members of East Asian communities be likely to attend a protest).

In the focus group, the students read both the control and cancel culture fictitious racism scenarios and the collective action intention measure and provided feedback on each. No changes were made to the fictitious scenarios as a result of the focus group feedback. We received positive feedback from participants about the realism, cultural sensitivity, and participant responses to both the control and cancel culture conditions. However, the collective action measure was modified to include some actions in which the group indicated members of East Asian communities would be more likely to engage (e.g., writing to government officials).

Data was collected via Prolific , an online survey research platform for social sciences. The survey was available to participants who were of East Asian descent and residing in either Canada or the United States. Participants were remunerated with $6 USD for approximately 30 min of time. Cases were removed if participants did not complete the core measures of the survey (33 cases) or spent less than 500 s (approximately 8 min; 12 cases). 3 Despite using Prolific demographic filters, some participants did not indicate being of East Asian descent and these cases were removed (17 cases). Due to a technological error, the randomly assigned condition for two participants was not recorded by Qualtrics and these cases were removed. The total sample following removal of problematic cases consisted of 237 self-identified East Asian Canadian and American participants. Demographic information is listed in Table 4 below.

Table 4 . Summary of participant demographics (Study 2).

In this pre-registered experiment, 4 Participants were told that the researchers were interested in “understanding responses to contentious online topics and behaviours.” Those who signed up for the study were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In both conditions, participants read a fictitious scenario of a racist incident in the Vancouver community. In the cancel culture condition this was followed by a description of an episode of cancel culture against the perpetrator group. In the control condition, participants read only the scenario of a racist incident without any additional information. Following exposure to the given condition, participants responded to measures of the same variables in Study 1.

Table 5 . Correlation matrix for all variables.

Table 6 . Direct effects of predicted model 81.

Manipulation

The cancel culture condition included a scenario describing a racist incident in the community followed by a description of a targeted campaign by others from the community to cancel the perpetrator. While the racist incident described in the scenario was fictitious, it was based on real experiences of East Asian and Pacific Islander Canadians and Americans throughout the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., Kambhampaty and Sakaguchi, 2020 ; Baylon and Cecco, 2021 ). Descriptions of these real-world experiences were reviewed prior to writing the scenario. The episode of cancel culture included components naturally found in real-world cancel culture scenarios such as high visibility (“ the post had 2,200 likes and has been shared over 300 times by the Vancouver community and beyond ”); public denouncing of norm violation (“ This is deplorable, especially during a time when we should be working together ”); punishment of the perpetrators (e.g., calls for police investigations and expulsion from programs) and calls for justice (“ It’s time for racists in this community to face the consequences of their actions ”); and expressions of support of the harmed group (“ East-Asian people are right to expect better from their neighbors ”).

Control scenario

The control condition included the same racist incident but did not include the description of the cancel culture episode.

Participants responded to 24-items consistent with the definition of feelings of collective validation (e.g., “ The experiences of harm faced by East Asian people are recognized by the community ”). Responses were provided on a 5-point scale (1 Strongly disagree to 5 Strongly agree ). Higher scores indicate greater felt collective validation ( α = 0.91). See Appendix A . 5

Participants responded to a shorter (4-item rather than 8-item) version of the anger (anger, frustration) and contempt (contemptuous and disgusted) measure adapted from Mackie et al. (2000) . Responses were provided on a 5-point scale (1 Not at all to 5 Extremely ). Higher scores indicate greater anger and contempt ( α = 0.90).

Participants responded to a 10-item measure that asked “ As an East Asian person, if I were in the situation described in the article, I would feel ”: empowered, in control of the situation, humiliated, inferior, defenseless, full of energy, stimulated, independent, not in control of the situation, and weak ( Moya-Garófano et al., 2021 ). Because of a technical error in the Qualtrics file, five of the 10 items (full of energy, stimulated, independent, not in control of the situation, and weak) were randomly omitted for 80 participants. Thus, a shorter 5-item version of the measure was used to maintain the entire sample. Responses were provided on a 5-point scale (1 Not at all to 5 Extremely ), and the reliability for this 5-item version was good ( α = 0.82; full 10-item measure α = 0.89). Scores for items indicating helplessness/disempowerment were reversed so that higher overall scores indicate greater feelings of collective empowerment.

Participants respond to 10-items about their willingness to participate in various forms of activism against anti-East Asian racism (e.g., “ Write a letter/email to government officials in my area regarding policies that impact East Asian peoples and cultures ”) on a 5-point scale (1 Very unlikely to 5 Very likely ). This measure was adapted from Becker and Wright (2011) for use with East Asian participants but was also informed by the focus group feedback with East Asian Canadian students regarding racism in their communities and ways they would be (un)likely to respond. Higher scores indicate greater willingness/intention to participate in collective action ( α = 0.90).

The results show a significant positive direct effect of Condition on Feelings of Collective Validation, but also a significant direct effect of Condition on Collective Empowerment that was not predicted. As predicted, there was a significant direct effect of Feelings of Collective Validation on Collective Empowerment. However, there was also a significant direct effect of Feelings of Collective Validation on Collective Anger and Contempt. In addition, there was a significant negative direct effect of Condition on Collective Anger and Contempt (not mediated by Feelings of Collective Validation) that was not predicted.

Further, Collective Anger and Contempt had a significant positive effect on Collective Action Intention, but the effect of Collective Empowerment on Collective Action Intention found in Study 1 did not emerge here.

Finally, significant indirect effects were found for Condition on Collective Action Intention mediated by Collective Anger and Contempt ( β = −0.16, 95% CI (−0.32, −0.04)), and for Condition on Collective Action Intention mediated sequentially by Collective Validation and Collective Anger and Contempt, and [ β = 0.09, 95% CI (0.02, 0.20)]. See Tables 5 , 6 and Figure 3 below for details.

Figure 2 . Study 1 mediation model result. Partial support for the predicted sequential indirect effects of condition on collective action intention mediated by feelings of collective validation, collective anger and contempt, collective empowerment. * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.01.

Overall, there is support for the primary prediction that being exposed to an episode of cancel culture will elicit feelings of collective validation and that these feelings of collective validation will be positively associated with collective action intentions. However, the overall correlation between Condition and Collective Action Intentions was small, suggesting possible other variables in the total effect.

Further, it was collective validation’s positive influence on collective anger and contempt, rather than empowerment, that accounted for its positive association with collective action intentions. In fact, while exposure to an episode of cancel culture and the subsequent feelings of collective validation were associated with collective empowerment, this empowerment did not enhance collective action intentions.

Figure 3 . Study 2 mediation model result. Partial support for the predicted sequential indirect effects of condition on collective action intention mediated by feelings of collective validation, collective anger and contempt. The direct effects of condition on collective anger and contempt and on collective empowerment were unexpected. * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.01.

The significant association between Feelings of Collective Validation and Collective Anger and Contempt found in Study 2 is consistent with van Zomeren et al.’s (2004) work on affective social support versus instrumental social support. The description of the cancel culture episode in Study 2 included more evidence of shared affective experiences (e.g., it included more emotionally charged comments such as, “If this bigot loses his business because of this, so be it ”), and this evidence of shared emotions appears to have served to validate the participants’ own feelings of collective anger and contempt. Thus, this aspect of validation may be similar to what van Zomeren et al. (2004) are describing as affective social support, which they have shown increases interest in collective action through increased anger (e.g., van Zomeren et al., 2008b ). Thus, it appears that cancel culture can serve to collectively validate action-oriented negative emotions like anger and contempt if the content and tone of cancelling focuses on these shared emotions. Thus, collective validation may lead to collective action through either what van Zomeren et al. (2004) have called an emotional (usually anger; see also van Zomeren et al., 2008a ) pathway or the collective empowerment pathway shown in Study 1 – or perhaps in some cases through both pathways.

Further, there was an interesting and unexpected negative direct effect of Condition on Collective Anger and Contempt and negative indirect effect of Condition on Collective Action Intentions mediated by Collective Anger and Contempt. These findings may indicate that for our East Asian participants, exposure to cancel culture in defense of their group may alleviate perpetrator-directed negative emotions such as anger and contempt, rather than increase them. Perhaps this is because, through engaging in cancel culture, the superordinate group shares the emotional burden of anger and contempt with the harmed group, especially if affective social support is present. However, these findings also emphasise the importance of the role of collective validation in the model. More research is needed to understand these effects fully.

Collective empowerment and collective action intentions

The lack of a significant effect of empowerment on collective action intention is inconsistent with the findings of previous research and theorizing (e.g., Drury et al., 2005 ), as well as the surprising significant negative collective validation and empowerment pathway in the exploratory analysis. There are several possible explanations for these findings. The measure of collective empowerment only included five of the 10 items because of a random error. It is also possible that the measure did not capture the aspects of collective empowerment that drive collective action.

Construct validity of collective empowerment measure

The Collective Empowerment measure may be measuring something other than empowerment as it is usually defined and understood. Items on this empowerment measure such as “ humiliated ,” “ inferior ,” and “ defenseless ” may be capturing feelings of safety and group status instead of empowerment ( Hartling and Luchetta, 1999 ; Edmondson, 2004 ; Farbod et al., 2017 ) that may lead participants to disengage in response to harmful situations to protect themselves and their communities from further harm or backlash.

To roughly assess the construct validity of the measure, Model 81 was reanalyzed using only the “ empowerment” and “ in control of the situation” items of the Collective Empowerment measure (α = 0.86). Both items include components of empowerment as defined by Rappaport (1987) and Wright (2010) and are consistent with the empowerment measure used in Study 1. Overall, participants reported low Collective Empowerment ( x̄ =1.95, SD = 0.95 on a 5-point scale). However, results show a significant, but small, positive direct effect of Collective Empowerment on Collective Action Intentions ( β = 0.12, SE = 0.06, 95% CI (0.00, 0.25), p = 0.05), with small positive significant indirect effects of Condition on Collective Action Intentions mediated by Collective Empowerment ( β = 0.07, 95% CI (0.00, 0.17)) and of Condition on Collective Action Intentions mediated sequentially by Feelings of Collective Validation and Collective Empowerment ( β = 0.03, 95% CI (0.00, 0.06)). Thus, while the effects are small, there is evidence that the negative items on the Moya-Garófano et al. (2021) empowerment measure may be impacting the construct validity of the measure.

Feelings of collective validation and social identity

The social identity of East Asian peoples might be important for understanding the pathway from collective validation to collective action. Indeed, some prior research has identified social identity as an important and meaningful predictor of collective action. For example, van Zomeren et al.’s (2008a) SIMCA includes politicized identity as a main predictive pathway of collective action (see also Simon and Klandermans, 2001 ). Similarly, Foster et al. (2021) found politicized identity to be important for women engaging in online collective action. Thus, it is possible that the scenario in each study primed participants to think more about their woman (Study 1) or East Asian (Study 2) identities and this may be responsible for the differing empowerment and collective anger and contempt results.

Further, most of the literature on empowerment and collective action focuses on White Western samples and contexts (see Zimmerman, 2000 ; Lardier et al., 2020 ), which may not generalize to the East Asian Canadians/Americans in this sample. Therefore, it is possible that episodes of cancel culture that explicitly provide greater affective social support of the East Asian community (as was done in Study 2), may inspire the kind of collective validation that allows for greater expression of perpetrator-directed negative emotions. This may be, in part, because this affective social support directly challenges stereotypical expectations of East Asian people imposed by the MMM ( Aguirre and Lio, 2008 ; Yoo et al., 2010 ; Lee, 2022 ).

Therefore, future research should consider the important role of specific social identities and the nature of the existing intergroup relations experienced by those groups. Feelings of collective validation and its impact on emotions and collective empowerment may vary depending on the specific histories, and current social realities of these different groups.

As well, it should be noted that the cancel culture scenarios in both studies were based on real-world instances and widely understood definitions of cancel culture. For example, Ng (2020) states that cancel culture is “ the withdrawal of any kind of support (viewership, social media follows, purchases of products endorsed by the person, etc.) for those who are assessed to have said or done something unacceptable or highly problematic, generally from a social justice perspective especially alert to sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, bullying, and related issues ” (p. 623). The scenarios used in the current studies reflect this definition. However, it must also be recognized that no direct manipulation checks were used to assess whether participants perceived the scenarios to reflect or represent an episode of cancel culture. Thus, future studies should address this potential limitation by including manipulation checks or providing other direct evidence that participants recognized the scenarios as reflecting the core elements of cancel culture.

General discussion

Two experimental studies examined the role of feelings of collective validation in the context of cancel culture as an important determinant of collective action through its impact on collective empowerment and collective anger and contempt. Across both studies, there is evidence that feelings of collective validation play an important mediating role in the relationship between cancel culture and collective action intentions. However, the two studies provide a somewhat less definitive story concerning the mediational processes that account for collective validation’s association with collective action. Study 1 supports only a collective empowerment pathway from collective validation to collective action intentions in a sexism context, while Study 2 supports only a collective anger and contempt pathway from collective validation to collective action intentions in an anti-East Asian racism context.

Implications and future directions

Cancel culture, feelings of collective validation, and collective action intentions.

Overall, the present research provides novel evidence that cancel culture and feelings of collective validation should be included and examined in collective action research and theory. For example, through cancel culture, members of the superordinate group – which includes more than just members of the relevant ingroup and members of the perpetrator group – can be involved in challenging a perpetrator group’s actions and disrupting (however fleeting) the online economy of visibility and structures of inequalities. This support from other members of the superordinate group can be validating for members of the group that has been harmed and this validation can agitate them enough to challenge the individuals, groups, and systems that have perpetuated this harm.

These findings are consistent with a recent study by Foster et al. (2021 , see Study 2) who found that women were motivated toward collective action when they anticipated greater personal validation from others for responding to sexist tweets. Similarly, Droogendyk et al. (2016) identify “supportive contact” as an important determinant of increased collective action by the harmed group. This concept, in which an advantaged group member explicitly expresses their opposition to inequality and supports the harmed group’s goals, coincides with the elements of cancel culture (explicitly acknowledging harm and supporting group goals). Thus, it is possible that supportive contact elicits feelings of collective validation in similar ways as cancel culture and including measures of collective validation in future work on supportive contact may offer insights into the psychological mechanisms involved in its influences on collective action.

Cancel culture, collective validation, and Allyship

The present research also supports the inclusion of cancel culture and feelings of collective validation in research on allyship, as they appear to encompass important components of allyship. Along with supportive contact, Becker et al.’s (2022) (see also Becker and Wright, 2022) concept of “politicized contact” seems to be relevant to participation in cancel culture. In their work, Becker and colleagues show that contact that recognizes and includes discussion of group inequality is linked to greater solidarity-based allyship behaviour by advantaged group members. Thus, it seems that when members of the advantaged group, the harmed group, and even third-party groups all jointly engage, cancel culture could serve as a proxy for politicized contact and thus may increase solidarity-based collective action intentions among all three groups.

However, a critique of cancel culture is that it can backfire and alienate allies by making them afraid of being cancelled themselves for making simple mistakes. Ross (2021) claims “ [i]n our pursuit of political purity, we are alienating a lot of our allies, and we are criticizing them for not being ‘woke’ enough .” To address this strain on the ally-ingroup relationship, Ross promotes “call in” culture where allies and group members can have open, non-judgmental conversations about harm. Ross claims that call-in culture is about “ achieving accountability with grace, love, and respect as opposed to anger, shame, and humiliation .” This “call in” approach shares much with Becker et al.’s (2022) description of politicized contact and thus these conversations may well serve to increase allyship behaviours among the advantaged group.

However, the issue with positioning call-in culture and cancel culture against each other is that the goals and motivations of these two practices differ substantially. The goal for call-in culture, according to Ross, is to end oppression through meaningful work with allies, while one goal of cancel culture is to hold accountable powerful and perpetrator groups and people who refuse to hold themselves accountable. While calling someone in might be helpful with a willing and open ally, what happens when calling in fails because the harmful party refuses to acknowledge the harm they have caused? Who holds them responsible? How do we call in those with political and social power (e.g., celebrities, billionaires, politicians, police) who refuse to acknowledge their harmful actions? Thus, while Ross is correct in stating that the goal of the human rights movement is “ to end oppression ” and that call-in culture may be an effective method for achieving this long-term goal, it may also be true that a one-size-fits-all approach to achieving this goal is too narrow. Call-in culture may be less helpful where those who are marginalized and harmed are continuously silenced by their oppressors (e.g., as victims of sexual violence). In these situations, silencing perpetrators, prioritising support, and amplification of the harmed group seem more immediately important, especially if the harmed group deals with unique stereotypes and expectations based on their group identity (such as the MMM for East Asian communities). Therefore, cancel culture, as supported by the current research, may be effective in immediate harm-reduction for the harmed group in the form of feelings of collective validation and a subsequent stronger intention to work for change that may be another path to a long-term shift away from oppression.

The current research offers a novel theoretical and empirical introduction to the concept of collective validation and the understudied context of cancel culture to the existing research and theory in the social psychological literature on collective action and related topics (e.g., allyship). We found strong support that cancel culture is collectively validating for harmed groups, and that these feelings of collective validation mediate the relationship between cancel culture and collective action intentions. Therefore, we suggest and hope that future intergroup relations research on collective action and related concepts continue to utilise collective validation and cancel culture to deepen psychological understanding of collective action motivations and various psychological outcomes for harmed groups (e.g., wellbeing and life satisfaction, collective action intention and behaviour, empowerment, group identity, etc.).

Data availability statement

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://osf.io/qftn8/ .

Ethics statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Simon Fraser University Research Ethics Board. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author contributions

MT: writing, editing, recruiting participants, creating materials and survey, constructing measures, main data analyses, methodology and statistical analyses plan, power analyses, and theoretical background. YT: editing, recruiting participants, creating materials, focus group, and minor data analyses. SW: editing, methodology and statistical analyses plan, creation of materials, theoretical background. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This research was funded by a CGS-M SSHRC and SPSSI Clara Mayo grant awarded to the corresponding author.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge that this research was – in part – conducted on stolen territory belonging to the Coast Salish Nations, specifically the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̍ilw̍ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), kʷikʷəƛ̍əm (Kwikwetlem), and q̍icə̍y̍ (Katzie) Nations, on which Simon Fraser University lies. We would also like to acknowledge that this research was funded by a CGS-M SSHRC and SPSSI Clara Mayo grant awarded to the corresponding author and that this research was conducted as a master’s thesis project which can be found on the Simon Fraser University Library website at: https://sfuprimo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/usv8m3/01SFUL_ALMA51445265030003611 .

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1181872/full#supplementary-material

1. ^ Participants who spent less than 500 s on the survey had more incomplete data and tended to select the same scale values throughout (e.g., selecting five for every item). Participants who spent longer than 7,200 s on the survey were more likely to spend long periods of time on one page with questions that should only have taken minutes to complete, indicating that they may have left the survey open to complete other tasks and come back to it later.

2. ^ See Supplementary materials for EFA.

3. ^ No participant spent more than 7,200 s.

4. ^ osf.io/qftn8

5. ^ See Supplementary materials for EFA.

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Keywords: cancel culture, collective validation, collective action, intergroup relations, sexism, racism

Citation: Traversa M, Tian Y and Wright SC (2023) Cancel culture can be collectively validating for groups experiencing harm. Front. Psychol . 14:1181872. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1181872

Received: 08 March 2023; Accepted: 29 June 2023; Published: 20 July 2023.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2023 Traversa, Tian and Wright. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Marissa Traversa, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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The second wave of “cancel culture”

How the concept has evolved to mean different things to different people.

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“Cancel culture,” as a concept, feels inescapable. The phrase is all over the news, tossed around in casual social media conversation; it’s been linked to everything from free speech debates to Mr. Potato Head .

It sometimes seems all-encompassing, as if all forms of contemporary discourse must now lead, exhaustingly and endlessly, either to an attempt to “cancel” anyone whose opinions cause controversy or to accusations of cancel culture in action, however unwarranted.

In the rhetorical furor, a new phenomenon has emerged: the weaponization of cancel culture by the right.

Across the US, conservative politicians have launched legislation seeking to do the very thing they seem to be afraid of: Cancel supposedly left-wing businesses, organizations, and institutions; see, for example, national GOP figures threatening to punish Major League Baseball for standing against a Georgia voting restrictions law by removing MLB’s federal antitrust exemption.

Meanwhile, Fox News has stoked outrage and alarmism over cancel culture, including trying to incite Gen X to take action against the nebulous problem. Tucker Carlson, one of the network’s most prominent personalities, has emphatically embraced the anti-cancel culture discourse, claiming liberals are trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July .

The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing — but in its current form, we see how warped and imbalanced the power dynamics of the conversation really are.

All along, debate about cancel culture has obscured its roots in a quest to attain some form of meaningful accountability for public figures who are typically answerable to no one. But after centuries of ideological debate turning over questions of free speech, censorship, and, in recent decades, “political correctness,” it was perhaps inevitable that the mainstreaming of cancel culture would obscure the original concerns that canceling was meant to address. Now it’s yet another hyperbolic phase of the larger culture war.

The core concern of cancel culture — accountability — remains as crucial a topic as ever. But increasingly, the cancel culture debate has become about how we communicate within a binary, right versus wrong framework. And a central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how we can ever forgive.

Cancel culture has evolved rapidly to mean very different things to different people

It’s only been about six years since the concept of “cancel culture” began trickling into the mainstream. The phrase has long circulated within Black culture, perhaps paying homage to Nile Rodgers’s 1981 single “Your Love Is Cancelled.” As I wrote in my earlier explainer on the origins of cancel culture , the concept of canceling a whole person originated in the 1991 film New Jack City and percolated for years before finally emerging online among Black Twitter in 2014 thanks to an episode of Love and Hip-Hop: New York. Since then, the term has undergone massive shifts in meaning and function.

Early on, it most frequently popped up on social media, as people attempted to collectively “cancel,” or boycott, celebrities they found problematic. As a term with roots in Black culture, it has some resonance with Black empowerment movements, as far back as the civil rights boycotts of the 1950s and ’60s . This original usage also promotes the idea that Black people should be empowered to reject cultural figures or works that spread harmful ideas. As Anne Charity Hudley, the chair of linguistics of African America at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me in 2019 , “When you see people canceling Kanye, canceling other people, it’s a collective way of saying, ‘We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] we’re not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. ... ‘I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you.’”

As the logic behind wanting to “cancel” specific messages and behaviors caught on, many members of the public, as well as the media, conflated it with adjacent trends involving public shaming, callouts, and other forms of public backlash . (The media sometimes refers to all of these ideas collectively as “ outrage culture .”) But while cancel culture overlaps and aligns with many related ideas, it’s also always been inextricably linked to calls for accountability.

As a concept, cancel culture entered the mainstream alongside hashtag-oriented social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo — giant social waves that were effective in shifting longstanding narratives about victims and criminals, and in bringing about actual prosecutions in cases like those of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein . It is also frequently used interchangeably with “woke” political rhetoric , an idea that is itself tied to the 2014 rise of the Black Lives Matter protests. In similar ways, both “wokeness” and “canceling” are tied to collectivized demands for more accountability from social systems that have long failed marginalized people and communities.

But over the past few years, many right-wing conservatives, as well as liberals who object to more strident progressive rhetoric, have developed the view that “cancel culture” is a form of harassment intended to silence anyone who sets a foot out of line under the nebulous tenets of “woke” politics . So the idea now represents a vast assortment of objectives and can hold wildly different connotations, depending on whom you’re talking to.

Taken in good faith, the concept of “canceling” a person is really about questions of accountability — about how to navigate a social and public sphere in which celebrities, politicians, and other public figures who say or do bad things continue to have significant platforms and influence. In fact, actor LeVar Burton recently suggested the entire idea should be recast as “consequence culture.”

“I think it’s misnamed,” Burton told the hosts of The View . “I think we have a consequence culture. And that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they haven’t been ever in this country.”

. @levarburton : “In terms of cancel culture, I think it’s misnamed. I think we have a consequence culture and consequences are finally encompassing everybody.” #TheView pic.twitter.com/jDQ9HEJyV2 — Justice Dominguez (@justicedeveraux) April 26, 2021

Within the realm of good faith, the larger conversation around these questions can then expand to contain nuanced considerations of what the consequences of public misbehavior should be, how and when to rehabilitate the reputation of someone who’s been “canceled,” and who gets to decide those things.

Taken in bad faith, however, “cancel culture” becomes an omniscient and dangerous specter: a woke, online social justice mob that’s ready to rise up and attack anyone, even other progressives, at the merest sign of dissent. And it’s this — the fear of a nebulous mob of cancel-happy rabble-rousers — that conservatives have used to their political advantage.

Conservatives are using fear of cancel culture as a cudgel

Critics of cancel culture typically portray whoever is doing the canceling as wielding power against innocent victims of their wrath. From 2015 on, a variety of news outlets, whether through opinion articles or general reporting , have often framed cancel culture as “ mob rule .”

In 2019, the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu observed just how frequently some media outlets have compared cancel culture to violent political uprisings, ranging from ethnocide to torture under dictatorial regimes. Such an exaggerated framework has allowed conservative media to depict cancel culture as an urgent societal issue. Fox News pundits, for example, have made cancel culture a focal part of their coverage . In one recent survey , people who voted Republican were more than twice as likely to know what “cancel culture” was, compared with Democrats and other voters, even though in the current dominant understanding of cancel culture, Democrats are usually the ones doing the canceling.

“The conceit that the conservative right has gotten so many people to adopt , beyond divorcing the phrase from its origins in Black queer communities, is an obfuscation of the power relations of the stakeholders involved,” journalist Shamira Ibrahim told Vox in an email. “It got transformed into a moral panic akin to being able to irrevocably ruin the powerful with just the press of a keystroke, when it in actuality doesn’t wield nearly as much power as implied by the most elite.”

You wouldn’t know that to listen to right-wing lawmakers and media figures who have latched onto an apocalyptic scenario in which the person or subject who’s being criticized is in danger of being censored, left jobless, or somehow erased from history — usually because of a perceived left-wing mob.

This is a fear that the right has weaponized. At the 2020 Republican National Convention , at least 11 GOP speakers — about a third of those who took the stage during the high-profile event — addressed cancel culture as a concerning political phenomenon. President Donald Trump himself declared that “The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it.” One delegate resolution at the RNC specifically targeted cancel culture , describing a trend toward “erasing history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens, and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.”

Ibrahim pointed out that in addition to re-waging the war on political correctness that dominated the 1990s by repackaging it as a war on cancel culture, right-wing conservatives have also “attempted to launch the same rhetorical battles” across numerous fronts, attempting to rebrand the same calls for accountability and consequences as “woke brigade, digital lynch mobs, outrage culture and call-out culture.” Indeed, it’s because of the collective organizational power that online spaces provide to marginalized communities, she argued, that anti-cancel culture rhetoric focuses on demonizing them.

Social media is “one of the few spaces that exists for collective feedback and where organizing movements that threaten [conservatives’] social standing have begun,” Ibrahim said, “thus compelling them to invert it into a philosophical argument that doesn’t affect just them, but potentially has destructive effects on censorship for even the working-class individual.”

This potential has nearly become reality through recent forms of Republican-driven legislation around the country. The first wave involved overt censorship , with lawmakers pushing to ban texts like the New York Times’s 1619 Project from educational usage at publicly funded schools and universities. Such censorship could seriously curtail free speech at these institutions — an ironic example of the broader kind of censorship that is seemingly a core fear about cancel culture.

A recent wave of legislation has been directed at corporations as a form of punishment for crossing Republicans. After both Delta Air Lines and Major League Baseball spoke out against Georgia lawmakers’ passage of a restrictive voting rights bill , Republican lawmakers tried to target the companies, tying their public statements to cancel culture. State lawmakers tried and failed to pass a bill stripping Delta of a tax exemption . And some national GOP figures have threatened to punish MLB by removing its exemption from federal antitrust laws. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.”

But for all the hysteria and the actual crackdown attempts lawmakers have enacted, even conservatives know that most of the hand-wringing over cancellation is performative. CNN’s AJ Willingham pointed out how easily anti-cancel culture zeal can break down, noting that although the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was called “America Uncanceled,” the organization wound up removing a scheduled speaker who had expressed anti-Semitic viewpoints. And Fox News fired a writer last year after he was found to have a history of making racist, homophobic, and sexist comments online.

These moves suggest that though they may decry “woke” hysteria, conservatives also sometimes want consequences for extremism and other harmful behavior — at least when the shaming might fall on them as well.

“This dissonance reveals cancel culture for what it is,” Willingham wrote. “Accountability for one’s actions.”

CPAC’s swift levying of consequences in the case of a potentially anti-Semitic speaker is revealing on a number of levels, not only because it gives away the lie beneath concerns that “cancel culture” is something profoundly new and dangerous, but also because the conference actually had the power to take action and hold the speaker accountable. Typically, the apocryphal “social justice mob” has no such ability. Actually canceling a whole person is much harder to do than opponents of cancel culture might make it sound — nearly impossible, in fact.

Very few “canceled” public figures suffer significant career setbacks

It’s true that some celebrities have effectively been canceled, in the sense that their actions have resulted in major consequences, including job losses and major reputational declines, if not a complete end to their careers.

Consider Harvey Weinstein , Bill Cosby , R. Kelly , and Kevin Spacey , who faced allegations of rape and sexual assault that became impossible to ignore, and who were charged with crimes for their offenses. They have all effectively been “canceled” — Weinstein and Cosby because they’re now convicted criminals, Kelly because he’s in prison awaiting trial , and Spacey because while all charges against him to date have been dropped, he’s too tainted to hire.

Along with Roseanne Barr, who lost her hit TV show after a racist tweet , and Louis C.K., who saw major professional setbacks after he admitted to years of sexual misconduct against female colleagues, their offenses were serious enough to irreparably damage their careers, alongside a push to lessen their cultural influence.

But usually, to effectively cancel a public figure is much more difficult. In typical cases where “cancel culture” is applied to a famous person who does something that incurs criticism, that person rarely faces serious long-term consequences. During the past year alone, a number of individuals and institutions have faced public backlash for troubling behavior or statements — and a number of them thus far have either weathered the storm or else departed their jobs or restructured their operations of their own volition.

For example, beloved talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has come under fire in recent years for a number of reasons, from palling around with George W. Bush to accusing the actress Dakota Johnson of not inviting her to a party to, most seriously, allegedly fostering an abusive and toxic workplace . The toxic workplace allegations had an undeniable impact on DeGeneres’s ratings, with The Ellen DeGeneres Show losing over 40 percent of its viewership in the 2020–’21 TV season. But DeGeneres has not literally been canceled; her daytime talk show has been confirmed for a 19th season, and she continues to host other TV series like HBO Max’s Ellen’s Next Great Designer .

Another TV host recently felt similar heat but has so far retained his job: In February, The Bachelor franchise underwent a reckoning due to a long history of racial insensitivity and lack of diversity, culminating in the announcement that longtime host Chris Harrison would be “ stepping aside for a period of time.” But while Harrison won’t be hosting the upcoming season of The Bachelorette , ABC still lists him as the franchise host, and some franchise alums have come forward to defend him . (It is unclear whether Harrison will return as a host in the future, though he has said he plans to do so and has been working with race educators and engaging in a personal accountability program of “counsel, not cancel.”)

In many cases, instead of costing someone their career, the allegation of having been “canceled” instead bolsters sympathy for the offender, summoning a host of support from both right-wing media and the public. In March 2021, concerns that Dr. Seuss was being “canceled” over a decision by the late author’s publisher to stop printing a small selection of works containing racist imagery led to a run on Seuss’s books that landed him on bestseller lists. And although J.K. Rowling sparked massive outrage and calls to boycott all things Harry Potter after she aired transphobic views in a 2020 manifesto, sales of the Harry Potter books increased tremendously in her home country of Great Britain.

A few months later, 58 British public figures including playwright Tom Stoppard signed an open letter supporting Rowling’s views and calling her the target of “an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media.” And in December, the New York Times not only reviewed the author’s latest title — a new children’s book called The Ickabog — but praised the story’s “moral rectitude,” with critic Sarah Lyall summing up, “It made me weep with joy.” It was an instant bestseller .

In light of these contradictions, it’s tempting to declare that the idea of “canceling” someone has already lost whatever meaning it once had. But for many detractors, the “real” impact of cancel culture isn’t about famous people anyway.

Rather, they worry, “cancel culture” and the polarizing rhetoric it enables really impacts the non-famous members of society who suffer its ostensible effects — and that, even more broadly, it may be threatening our ability to relate to each other at all.

The debate around cancel culture began as a search for accountability. It may ultimately be about encouraging empathy.

It’s not only right-wing conservatives who are wary of cancel culture. In 2019, former President Barack Obama decried cancel culture and “woke” politics, framing the phenomenon as people “be[ing] as judgmental as possible about other people” and adding, “That’s not activism.”

At a recent panel devoted to making a nonpartisan “ Case Against Cancel Culture ,” former ACLU president Nadine Strossen expressed great concern over cancel culture’s chilling effect on the non-famous. “I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship,” she said. Strossen cited as one such chilling effect the isolated instances of students whose college admissions had been rescinded on the basis of racist social media posts.

In his recent book Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture , human rights lawyer and free speech advocate Dan Kovalik argues that cancel culture is basically a giant self-own, a product of progressive semantics that causes the left to cannibalize itself.

“Unfortunately, too many on the left, wielding the cudgel of ‘cancel culture,’ have decided that certain forms of censorship and speech and idea suppression are positive things that will advance social justice,” Kovalik writes . “I fear that those who take this view are in for a rude awakening.”

Kovalik’s worries are partly grounded in a desire to preserve free speech and condemn censorship. But they’re also grounded in empathy. As America’s ideological divide widens, our patience with opposing viewpoints seems to be waning in favor of a type of society-wide “cancel and move on” approach, even though studies suggest that approach does nothing to change hearts and minds. Kovalik points to a survey published in 2020 that found that in 700 interactions, “deep listening” — including “respectful, non-judgmental conversations” — was 102 times more effective than brief interactions in a canvassing campaign for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Across the political spectrum, wariness toward the idea of “cancel culture” has increased — but outside of right-wing political spheres, that wariness isn’t so centered on the hyper-specific threat of losing one’s job or career due to public backlash. Rather, the term “cancel culture” functions as shorthand for an entire mode of polarized, aggressive social engagement.

Journalist (and Vox contributor) Zeeshan Aleem has argued that contemporary social media engenders a mode of communication he calls “disinterpretation,” in which many participants are motivated to join the conversation not because they want to promote communication, or even to engage with the original opinion, but because they seek to intentionally distort the discourse.

In this type of interaction, as Aleem observed in a recent Substack post, “Commentators are constantly being characterized as believing things they don’t believe, and entire intellectual positions are stigmatized based on vague associations with ideas that they don’t have any substantive affiliation with.” The goal of such willful misinterpretation, he argued, is conformity — to be seen as aligned with the “correct” ideological standpoint in a world where stepping out of alignment results in swift backlash, ridicule, and cancellation.

Such an antagonistic approach “effectively treats public debate as a battlefield,” he wrote. He continued:

It’s illustrative of a climate in which nothing is untouched by polarization, in which everything is a proxy for some broader orientation which must be sorted into the bin of good/bad, socially aware/problematic, savvy/out of touch, my team/the enemy. ... We’re tilting toward a universe in which all discourse is subordinate to activism; everything is a narrative, and if you don’t stay on message then you’re contributing to the other team on any given issue. What this does is eliminate the possibility of public ambiguity, ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, self-interrogation.

The problem with this style of communication is that in a world where every argument gets flattened into a binary under which every opinion and every person who publicly shares their thoughts must be either praised or canceled, few people are morally righteous enough to challenge that binary without their own motives and biases then being called into question. The question becomes, as Aleem reframed it for me: “How does someone avoid the reality that their claims of being disinterpreted will be disinterpreted?”

“When people demand good-faith engagement, it can often be dismissed as a distraction tactic or whining about being called out,” he explained, noting that some responses to his original Twitter thread on the subject assumed he must be complaining about just such a callout.

Other complications can arise, such as when the people who are protesting against this type of bad-faith discourse are also criticized for problematic statements or behavior , or perceived as having too much privilege to wholly understand the situation. Remember, the origins of cancel culture are rooted in giving marginalized members of society the ability to seek accountability and change, especially from people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, power, and privilege.

“[W]hat people do when they invoke dog whistles like ‘cancel culture’ and ‘culture wars,’” Danielle Butler wrote for the Root in 2018, “is illustrate their discomfort with the kinds of people who now have a voice and their audacity to direct it towards figures with more visibility and power.”

But far too often, people who call for accountability on social media seem to slide quickly into wanting to administer punishment instead. In some cases, this process really does play out with a mob mentality, one that seems bent on inflicting pain and hurt while allowing no room for growth and change, showing no mercy, and offering no real forgiveness — let alone allowing for the possibility that the mob itself might be entirely unjustified.

See, for example, trans writer Isabel Fall, who wrote a short story in 2020 that angered many readers with its depiction of gender dysphoria through the lens of militaristic warfare. (The story has since become a finalist for a Hugo Award.) Because Fall published under a pseudonym, people who disliked the story assumed she must be transphobic rather than a trans woman wrestling with her own dysphoria. Fall was harassed, doxed, forcibly outed, and driven offline . These types of “cancellations” can happen without consideration for the person being canceled, even when that person apologizes — or, as in Fall’s case, even when they had little if anything to be sorry about.

The conflation of antagonized social media debates with the more serious aims to make powerful people face consequences is part of the problem. “I think the messy and turbulent evolution of speech norms online influences people’s perception of what’s called cancel culture,” Aleem said. He added that he’s grown “resistant to using the term [cancel culture] because it’s become so hard to pin down.”

“People connect boycotts with de-platforming speakers on college campuses,” he observed, “with social media harassment, with people being fired abruptly for breaching a taboo in a viral video.” The result is an environment where social media is a double-edged sword: “One could argue,” Aleem said, “that there’s now public input on issues [that wasn’t available] before, and that’s good for civil society, but that the vehicle through which that input comes produces some civically unhealthy ways of expression.”

Prevailing confusion about cancel culture hasn’t stopped it from becoming culturally and politically entrenched

If the conversation around cancel culture is unhealthy, then one can argue that the social systems cancel culture is trying to target are even more unhealthy — and that, for many people, is the bottom line.

The concept of canceling someone was created by communities of people who’ve never had much power to begin with. When people in those communities attempt to demand accountability by canceling someone, the odds are still stacked against them. They’re still the ones without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement, but they can at least be vocal by calling for a collective boycott.

The push by right-wing lawmakers and pundits to use the concept as a tool to vilify the left, liberals, and the powerless upends the original logic of cancel culture, Ibrahim told me. “It is being used to obscure marginalized voices by inverting the victim and the offender, and disingenuously affording disproportionate impact to the reach of a single voice — which has historically long been silenced — to now being the silencer of cis, male, and wealthy individuals,” she said.

And that approach is both expanding and growing more visible. What’s more, it is a divide not just between ideologies, but also between tactical approaches in navigating those ideological differences and dealing with wrongdoing.

“It effectuates a slippery-slope argument by taking a rhetorical scenario and pushing it to really absurdist levels, and furthermore asking people to suspend their implicit understanding of social constructs of power and class,” Ibrahim said. “It mutates into, ‘If I get canceled, then anyone can get canceled.’” She pointed out that usually, the supposedly “canceled” individual suffers no real long-term harm — “particularly when you give additional time for a person to regroup from a scandal. The media cycle iterates quicker than ever in present day.”

She suggested that perhaps the best approach to combating the escalation of cancel culture hysteria into a political weapon is to refuse to let those with power shape the way the conversation plays out.

“I think our remit, if anything, is to challenge that reframing and ask people to define the stakes of what material quality of life and liberty was actually lost,” she said.

In other words, the way cancel culture is discussed in the media might make it seem like something to fear and avoid at all costs, an apocalyptic event that will destroy countless lives and livelihoods, but in most cases, it’s probably not. That’s not to suggest that no one will ever be held accountable, or that powerful people won’t continue to be asked to answer for their transgressions. But the greater worry is still that people with too much power might use it for bad ends.

At its best, cancel culture has been about rectifying power imbalances and redistributing power to those who have little of it. Instead, it now seems that the concept may have become a weapon for people in power to use against those it was intended to help.

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