Americans are experiencing historic national pessimism. Polls find Americans feel that the country needs major changes, but doubt these changes are possible.
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.
In many ways, the country is moving in the opposite direction the public wants. Americans largely favor expanding clean energy, yet federal incentives for it are being dismantled and the banks are walking away from their climate pledges. Similarly, national healthcare programs are more popular than ever, yet policy is moving to strip coverage from millions. And an astonishing 97% of Americans say the immensely wealthy AI industry should face some form of oversight, and yet Washington has moved to stop states from regulating it.
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?
Our research suggests a more hopeful outlook. Even amid systemic opposition, the public’s voice matters—a lot. Specifically, we find social change can be mobilized when two groups are united behind a solution: scientists and the public.
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.
We found that when people learned that scientists and the public both backed a solution, they became more supportive of climate, health, and AI policies, more inclined to pursue solutions like electric vehicles and new vaccines, and more willing to donate their own money to the cause. Collectively, these choices are the building blocks of social change: the votes, purchases, donations, advocacy, and visible support through which public opinion begins to shape markets, movements, and eventually institutions.
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.
In other words, failure of our major institutions need not leave the public powerless and immobilized. Government and industry opposition can make progress feel unrealistic, futile, or out of reach. But our findings point to an antidote to the demotivating pull of institutional inaction: it can be offset by a different kind of signal, a bottom-up one, that helps keep the public from giving up.
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
Together, visible support from scientists and citizens can restore the two things institutional retreat takes away: confidence that action is sound, and confidence that it will not be taken alone.
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.
While there is a lot to be hopeful about in these findings, there is an important catch. Our studies show what happens when people are given clear signals that scientists and the public hold a particular view. But in day-to-day life, people may not know what the general public or scientists actually think. We rarely get unfiltered information about public opinion or scientific consensus. Instead, their positions are conveyed to us through the media, political elites, and heads of industry who can amplify, mute, or distort them. The predictable result is that Americans badly misjudge where everyone stands. People consistently underestimate how many of their fellow citizens, and how many scientists, support action on issues like climate change. And when those misperceptions are corrected, willingness to engage goes up.
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.
In this effort, journalists, communicators, and advocates become indispensable, because the public cannot draw motivation from an agreement it does not know exists. Correcting the widespread underestimation of how much scientists and ordinary people actually want action may be one of the highest-leverage things a communicator can do. And it means no one should mistake the silence of governments and corporations for the last word. Their opposition, our results suggest, is far less paralyzing than it feels in the headlines, as long as the alternative coalition is loud enough to be heard.
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.
Anandita Sabherwal and Gregg Sparkman
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