For many Americans, just following the news can feel exhausting. Each day, Americans see health protections rolled back, climate commitments abandoned, and more technologies that nobody asked for and nobody can opt out of. The decisions that shape our lives—health coverage, the air children will breathe, the tools they will grow up with—seem to be made far above our heads.
What is there to do when big companies, and even the government, stand in the way of progress on national emergencies? The scale of these problems alone is intimidating: one may reasonably worry, “Can I make any difference? Even if I take action, will others join in?” It is well documented that this sense of futility is demotivating. And, research also shows that when people believe powerful actors will not do their part, they conclude their own effort is both pointless and unfair, and they disengage from the issue. Faced with all of this, is civil society simply powerless?
Through a mix of survey and field studies involving more than 55,000 Americans, we examined how people decide whether to act on a national problem when they receive signals about what to do from a variety of influential players in society: scientists, fellow citizens, governments, and private companies. The finding was strikingly consistent. The joint endorsement of scientific experts and the general public was the most powerful force motivating Americans to act, whether on climate, public health, or technology.
Crucially, these effects held even when government bodies and private companies actively opposed the action. In one experiment we conducted, options backed by scientists and the public were chosen about 80% of the time, even when people learned both the government and industry opposed them. We then experimented with the reverse scenario: when a solution was backed by government and industry but opposed by scientists and the public. In this case, the solution was less than half as likely to be chosen.
When you speak up, you are not simply expressing a private opinion. You are helping create the public signal that others use to decide whether change is possible. Your voice becomes part of the evidence that people are not alone in wanting change and that powerful institutions do not have to get the final word. When citizens’ support is made visible alongside scientific consensus, it can move others to act—even when government and industry stand in the way
Intuitively, scientists and the public meet two distinct human needs: Scientists are typically seen as knowledgeable, satisfying the need to be right, while fellow citizens are seen as relatable and likable, satisfying the need to belong. Our theory is that because the two core needs operate through different psychological channels, the duo is more persuasive than either alone. By contrast, the influence of government and industry on Americans’ decisions to take action is relatively weaker. Government support or opposition to a solution carried less weight than some may assume, perhaps due to Americans’ historically low trust in government.
In our eyes, this points to a clear course of action: We must build coalitions between scientists and citizens and make those coalitions visible. A scientific consensus on its own can be shrugged off as esoteric or impractical, and a popular movement on its own may be dismissed as uninformed, but articulated together, in the form of "the experts agree, and so do the neighbors next door," they become far harder to ignore.
None of this means institutions don't matter. Ultimately, durable solutions need policy and capital behind them. But our findings overturn the assumption that may be underlying America's current pessimism: that the public needs to wait for action from the top. It doesn’t. The most powerful force we found in moving Americans to act toward social change was not a government mandate or a corporate pledge, but the visible agreement of scientists and ordinary people. That coalition already exists on many of the nation's most urgent problems—it may simply be invisible to Americans. Every time you voice support for a solution the science backs, you are not just expressing an opinion; you are supplying the evidence someone else needs to believe change is possible. Two hundred and fifty years in, that remains the idea this country stands for: that ordinary people, not the powerful, get the final word.
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