What social science tells us about how change actually happens, and why it matters for how we carry the state of the world
There is a particular kind of despair that has nothing to do with your own life going wrong. Your relationships are intact, your health is reasonable, your immediate circumstances are manageable. And yet something presses down. The news arrives each morning carrying fresh evidence of catastrophe: the latest climate report, another conflict with no visible end, the persistence of inequality that no amount of policy seems to touch. The feeling that the world is in serious trouble, and that nothing you or anyone like you does will make the slightest difference to any of it.
This is not self-pity. It is not neurotic anxiety. It is a reasonable response to genuinely difficult circumstances. And it is becoming one of the more common things people bring quietly into therapy, not as the presenting problem, but as a weight they carry underneath everything else.
This post is about that weight. About what we tend to believe about change, why those beliefs are often wrong, and what the evidence actually suggests about how large-scale shifts happen. Not because optimism is a moral obligation or because positive thinking changes geopolitics, but because the story we tell ourselves about whether change is possible shapes, in significant ways, what we are able to do and how we are able to live.
The psychology of collective helplessness
In the 1960s and 1970s, psychologist Martin Seligman and colleagues documented what they called learned helplessness: the phenomenon in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events leads an organism to stop trying to escape or influence those events, even when escape later becomes possible (Seligman & Maier, 1967). The original research was conducted with animals, but the human parallel has been extensively documented. People who experience repeated situations in which their actions have no effect on outcomes begin to generalise that helplessness, assuming that future situations are equally uncontrollable, even when they are not.
The relevance to our current cultural moment is not hard to see. Decades of climate reporting have delivered a consistent message: the situation is worsening, the window is narrowing, previous targets have been missed. Decades of news about global conflict have documented cycle after cycle of violence, negotiation, breakdown and recurrence. The persistence of inequality across generations, despite sustained attention and reform efforts, communicates something similar. For a psychologically attuned person paying attention, the cumulative message can begin to feel like nothing changes. Nothing works. What you do does not matter. That’s how it feels. Is that how it really is, though?
In fact, no, this is learned helplessness at a collective scale. And like its individual equivalent, it tends to produce passivity, withdrawal, and a kind of numbing that is protective in the short term but costly over time.
There is also the question of sustained exposure. Research has documented what is sometimes called headline stress disorder, a pattern of heightened anxiety and physiological arousal produced by chronic engagement with distressing news, particularly in the social media era where the news cycle is continuous and the emotional register is almost uniformly urgent. The psychological cost of staying informed about the state of the world is real, and it is not evenly distributed. People with higher empathy, stronger moral commitments, and greater global awareness tend to carry more of it.
Should we switch off? Is it all hopeless? Disengagement when change feels impossible is an option, but it isn’t the answer. The despair many people feel about large-scale problems is not a personal failing or a sign of weakness. It is a real, predictable psychological response to a genuinely difficult information environment, but there is more to this and it is really important to understand the whole picture.
What the most affected people have in common
Before turning to the evidence about how change happens, it is worth pausing on something that tends to go unnamed. The people who feel the psychological weight of the world most acutely are not, as a rule, the most fragile or the most anxious. They are, more often, the most compassionate.
It is worth distinguishing here between empathy and compassion, two concepts that are often used interchangeably but which function rather differently. Psychologist Paul Bloom has argued that empathy, in its narrow sense of feeling what another person feels, can actually be a poor guide to moral action because it is biased toward the proximate and the visible. We feel most acutely for people who are in front of us, who look like us, whose suffering is concrete and immediate (Bloom, 2016). Compassion is something broader and more durable. Compassion is the sustained concern for the wellbeing of others, including those we will never meet, that motivates action even when the suffering is abstract, distant, or statistical. This is an important distinction because empathy might help us act morally in the immediate environment, but compassion motivates us to moral action even when we might never see the direct results of our actions. It is compassion in this sense, rather than empathy narrowly defined, that drives the kind of sustained engagement with large-scale problems that we’re exploring here.
Compassion is not a liability. It is the perceptual equipment that allows a person to register what is actually happening in the world and to feel its significance. And it is one of the most important drivers of prosocial behaviour, collective action, and the search for solutions that account for others rather than retreating into narrow self-protection.
The problem is that compassion, when it encounters a sense of powerlessness, can curdle into something that looks like hopelessness. If you did not care about the outcome, the apparent intractability of climate change or global conflict would not press down on you the way it does. The distress is proportional to the concern. And this can create a painful loop: the more you care, the worse you feel, and the worse you feel, the harder it becomes to act, and the harder it becomes to act, the more helpless you feel about the very things you care most about.
This loop is real. But it rests on a mistaken assumption, one that the rest of this post will address. Hold that thought for now.
What we believe about change is often wrong
One of the most significant drivers of collective hopelessness is a belief about how change happens. The intuitive model most people carry is quite democratic. We believe change requires majority support. If most people do not want something to shift, it won’t. And if the polls consistently show that people are not sufficiently alarmed, or not sufficiently motivated, or not sufficiently unified, then the cause is probably lost.
This model is not entirely wrong. But it is not entirely right either. Let’s look at the nuance here because it is important.
Political scientist Erica Chenoweth spent years analysing hundreds of political resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, examining which succeeded in bringing about significant political change and which did not. The finding that emerged has become one of the most cited and most striking in the field: no nonviolent campaign that achieved the sustained active participation of at least 3.5 percent of the population ever failed to bring about change (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011).
Three and a half percent. In a country of 26 million people, that is less than a million. In a country of 330 million, it is fewer than 12 million. These are large numbers in absolute terms, but they are a small fraction of the population. And the historical record suggests that when sustained, nonviolent collective action reaches that threshold, it has, without exception in the dataset, produced significant change.
Several important caveats are worth holding alongside this finding. Chenoweth’s research focused specifically on campaigns aimed at political regime change, and the generalisability to other kinds of social transformation is not guaranteed. The analysis is retrospective, meaning it describes what has been true rather than predicting what will be. And contemporary conditions, including mass surveillance, sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and the fragmentation of collective attention, may complicate the picture in ways that historical data cannot fully anticipate. Chenoweth herself has described the rule as a tendency rather than a law.
But the core insight is important: the change threshold is lower than most people assume. The belief that nothing can shift until a majority is mobilised is not well supported by the historical record. Committed, sustained, organised minorities have driven the most significant political transformations of the past century, often well before those transformations commanded majority approval.
Why the 3.5 percent threshold matters: the human mechanism
The statistic is strikingly small. It’s not 51%, it’s not even close to a majority. What is sit about a small committed minority that matters? It is the mechanism behind it is where the real insight lies. And the mechanism turns out to be deeply, specifically human.
Chenoweth describes one of the key reasons nonviolent campaigns that reach critical mass tend to succeed: during a peaceful street protest of millions of people, the members of the security forces may also be more likely to fear that their family members or friends are in the crowd, meaning that they refuse to crack down on the movement. Or when they are looking at the sheer numbers of people involved, they may come to the conclusion the ship has sailed, and they do not want to go down with it.
What this describes is not a political calculation. It is a human one. The movement becomes too personal to suppress. The people whose job it is to enforce the status quo find themselves looking into a crowd and recognising people they love. In Bloom’s terms, this is empathy in its most immediate and visceral form, the felt recognition of a specific person whose suffering would be unbearable to cause, overriding the abstract institutional logic of enforcement. But it is also something more than that. The visible presence of a movement large enough to include someone you love signals something about the breadth of shared human concern, the compassion that has been quietly held by far more people than the spiral of silence made visible. The institutional logic of enforcement runs directly into the relational logic of compassion, and compassion wins.
This is not incidental to how change happens. It is central to it. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed than violent ones precisely because they maintain the conditions under which this recognition is possible. They keep the humanity of the movement visible. They make it harder for those in authority to reduce participants to abstractions, because the participants are too numerous and too present and too recognisably human to abstract away.
Why change looks sudden even when it is not
One reason the 3.5 percent finding can be hard to internalise is that social change often appears to happen suddenly, which makes it look like a kind of miracle rather than the result of sustained effort. A law changes overnight. A government falls. An institution reverses a position it has held for decades. Where did that come from?
Economist Timur Kuran’s concept of preference falsification offers a compelling answer (Kuran, 1995). Kuran argued that people routinely misrepresent their private preferences in public because of social pressure. In environments where a particular view is dominant or perceived to be dominant, people with dissenting private views tend to suppress or conceal them to avoid social costs. This creates a systematic distortion between what people actually think and what they appear to think.
The consequence is that apparent consensus against change can mask much larger private support. When the social environment shifts, and the cost of expressing a dissenting view drops, the private preferences that were always there suddenly become visible. Change that looks sudden from the outside has usually been building quietly for years in the private beliefs of people who were not yet willing or able to say so publicly.
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence describes a related mechanism (Noelle-Neumann, 1974). People who perceive their opinion to be in the minority are less likely to express it. This makes the minority position appear even smaller than it actually is, which further suppresses expression by others who hold it. The feedback loop can create the impression of overwhelming consensus where the reality is considerably more mixed.
Both of these concepts are relevant to our current moment. The degree of private concern about climate, inequality and conflict may be considerably larger than public discourse suggests. The silence of many is not evidence of indifference. It is often evidence of the social costs of speaking, the exhaustion of repeated engagement with intractable problems, and the suppression of views that feel too large or too unpopular to express in ordinary conversation.
The social mechanism: how coalitions form and change builds
Research on collective action helps explain how the spiral of silence reverses. A field experiment studying Hong Kong university students, published in the American Economic Review: Insights, found that having participated in a protest in 2017 led to a significantly higher likelihood of participating in the next protest episode a year later. But the mechanism behind this persistence is the crucial detail: sustained political engagement was driven not by a strengthening of political beliefs in isolation, but by social network effects. Specifically, the increase in future protest participation only occurred when a sufficient fraction of an individual’s social network was also mobilised to attend the initial protest. One-time mobilisation shocks have dynamic consequences, but only when they happen at the social network level (Bursztyn, Cantoni, Yang, Yuchtman & Zhang, 2021).
In other words, showing up does not just reflect commitment. It builds community. And it is the community, more than the individual act of attendance, that sustains the commitment over time. When you participate in collective action alongside people you already know, or form new connections through the act of participating together, you become part of a social network in which concern is shared, expressed, and mutually reinforced. Each member of that network makes it easier for the others to show up again. The coalition is not assembled in advance and then deployed. It is built through the act of participation itself, one relationship at a time.
Understanding this changes how we think about individual action. The direct causal effect of any single person attending a march, signing a petition, or having a difficult conversation about climate change is negligible in isolation. But the social effect, the contribution to a network of mutual recognition and shared commitment that makes the next act of participation more likely for everyone connected to it, is cumulative and compounding. You are not trying to change the world alone. You are joining and extending a web of connection that, at sufficient scale, changes the world together.
This is also why the personal connection mechanism in the 3.5 percent threshold works as it does. It is not simply that large numbers of people show up. It is that those people are embedded in social networks that extend into every part of society, including into the families, friendships and communities of the people whose job it is to enforce the status quo. The movement becomes too socially proximate to suppress. Compassion, operating through the ordinary bonds of human connection, becomes the mechanism of change.
Change happens before the majority catches up
There is one more piece of this picture that runs counter to how most people think about social change, and it may be the most hopeful of all.
We tend to assume that change requires majority support before it can happen. The historical record suggests not only that this is wrong, but that the causal arrow often runs in the opposite direction entirely. Change happens first. The majority catches up afterwards. And it is the change itself, embedded in law, in institutions, in the fabric of daily life, that shifts what people believe.
The data on this is striking. When the United States Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, only 24 percent of White Southerners approved of it, while 66 percent disapproved (Gallup, 1964). The law passed anyway, enacted by a committed minority of legislators responding to sustained nonviolent pressure from a movement that had reached critical mass. By 1984, 92 percent of Americans surveyed said the civil rights movement had improved the lives of the Black community. By 1991, 58 percent believed the Black community had been helped by civil rights legislation (Roper Center, 1991). The beliefs did not produce the law. The law, over time, produced the beliefs.
The trajectory of marriage equality tells a similar story. In 2004, 60 percent of registered American voters opposed same-sex marriage. Support crossed the majority threshold for the first time around 2011, roughly when legalisation in various states was already underway. In 2015, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling made marriage equality the law of the land across the United States. By 2025, 68 percent of Americans supported it (Gallup, 2025). The shift in public opinion did not cause the legal change. The legal change, normalising what had previously seemed transgressive, accelerating contact between people and the reality of same-sex marriages in their communities and families, drove much of the opinion shift.
This is what legal scholars call the law as teacher: the idea that law does not simply reflect existing values but actively shapes them. When behaviour is institutionally required or protected, people adapt. When the previously unthinkable becomes ordinary, attitudes follow.
The mechanism through which this happens is, again, relational. People encounter the change in their lived experience. They attend a colleague’s interracial wedding, or discover that their child’s best friend has two mothers, or watch a neighbourhood they were told to fear become somewhere they feel at ease. It is close contact, which is to say compassionate contact, that shifts the majority’s beliefs after the fact. The majority does not need to be convinced before change can happen. It needs to be exposed to the change long enough for its assumptions to update.
Why acting deepens commitment rather than depleting it
Research on collective action consistently finds that participation in acts of engagement tends to strengthen rather than weaken the commitment that motivated it in the first place (van Zomeren, Postmes & Spears, 2008). This is partly explained by cognitive dissonance theory: when we take a public, effortful action in support of a belief, we experience pressure to align our internal state with that action, which tends to deepen the belief rather than satisfy and release it. It is also explained by social identity processes: participation in collective action deepens identification with the group and the cause, making future engagement more likely and more meaningful.
The strategy of waiting until you feel more hopeful before you act is likely to backfire. Hope is not reliably a precondition for action. For many people, it is more accurately a consequence of it. Acting, even in small ways, even with uncertain outcomes, tends to generate a sense of agency and connection that passive observation of a worsening situation does not.
Holding hope without bypassing grief
None of this is an argument for toxic positivity, for reframing catastrophe as opportunity, or for insisting that everything will be fine. The problems are real. The stakes are high. The grief that thoughtful, attentive people feel about the state of the world is appropriate. Minimising it, rushing past it, or performing optimism as a substitute for genuine engagement with what is actually happening is its own form of avoidance.
Pema Chödrön’s concept of groundlessness (which is discussed in another blog post) is useful here (Chödrön, 1997). The impulse to reach for certainty, to find the reassuring frame that makes the situation feel more manageable, is understandable. But it tends to produce a kind of brittle hope that collapses under pressure from new evidence. The alternative is something harder and more durable: the willingness to remain present with genuine uncertainty, to grieve what is real about the current moment, and to act without requiring a guarantee of the outcome.
Brené Brown’s research on hope offers a complementary framing (Brown, 2010). Brown describes hope not as an emotion but as a belief. Hope can be thought of as the belief that the future can be better than the present, combined with the belief that you have the power to make it so, and the willingness to engage with the difficulty required to get there. On this account, hope is not something that happens to you. Hope is something you practise, and it is built through the experience of setting goals, tolerating the discomfort of working toward them, and finding ways through obstacles rather than around them.
We do not act because we are hopeful. We become hopeful, at least in part, because we act.
Carrying large concerns without being crushed by them
There is no simple prescription for how to hold concern about the big issues such as climate change, global conflict, and inequality without being overwhelmed by it. But there are things that the psychological literature suggests are more and less helpful.
Managing information exposure without disengaging entirely. The continuous news cycle is not a neutral medium. It is designed to maximise arousal and attention, and chronic exposure to distressing content without a sense of agency has documented psychological costs. Choosing when and how to engage with news, rather than leaving it on continuously, is not avoidance. It is reasonable self-regulation.
Finding a point of connection rather than trying to hold everything. The scale of global problems can produce a kind of paralysis of scope, where the very enormity of what needs to change makes it impossible to know where to begin. Research on sustainable activism suggests that people who find a specific, meaningful point of connection, a cause, a community, a form of contribution that feels genuinely theirs, are more likely to sustain engagement over time than those who try to hold all of it equally.
Staying connected to others who share the concern. Isolation amplifies despair. The spiral of silence means that many people who privately share your concern are not expressing it, which can create the false impression that you are more alone in your views than you actually are. Finding communities of genuine engagement, where the concern is shared and the conversation is honest, is one of the more reliable antidotes to collective hopelessness.
Tending to your own psychological resources. Sustained engagement with difficult causes over time requires a functioning self. Sleep, physical health, relationships, and activities that restore rather than deplete are not indulgences that distract from the important work. They are part of what makes the important work possible.
The thing that was causing the pain
We began with the observation that the people who feel the weight of the world most acutely tend to be the most compassionate. And then noticed that this can create a painful loop: the more you care, the worse you feel, and the worse you feel, the harder it becomes to act.
But look at what the evidence has revealed about how change actually happens.
The committed minority that reaches the threshold for change is a compassionate minority. The mechanism by which enforcement falters when protests reach critical mass is the compassionate recognition of people in authority when they see neighbours, friends and family members in the crowd. The mechanism by which coalitions form is the discovery, through collective action, that others share your concern, which is the social transmission of compassion made visible. The mechanism by which majorities eventually assimilate change is intimate relational contact with people whose lives the change touches, which is compassion operating at the level of ordinary daily life. And the alternative to all of this, self-interested disengagement, is not neutral. It is the condition under which the problems compound and the people most affected by them are left without the only resource that reliably changes things on their behalf.
Compassion is not the problem, it is the mechanism that drives the solution. Compassion is not a vulnerability that makes caring people suffer more than they should. It is the mechanism. It is what keeps authority from acting against movements whose participants are too human and too present to be reduced to abstractions. It is what builds the coalitions that reach the threshold for change. It is what shifts the beliefs of majorities who encounter the humanity of others up close, after the change they did not vote for has been made. And it is what keeps people oriented, in the face of genuine difficulty, toward solutions that account for others rather than toward the narrowing of concern that leaves everyone worse off.
The thing that was causing the pain turns out to be the thing that saves us. Not in spite of how much it hurts to care about the world. Because of it.
A final thought
Hard things are hard. The problems are real. The frustration of watching change move more slowly than the situation demands is legitimate. And the grief of genuinely caring about what is happening is not something to be bypassed or reframed away.
But the story that nothing changes, that majorities must be assembled before anything can shift, that the private concern of a compassionate minority is irrelevant to what happens next, is not well supported by the evidence. The history of change is largely the history of small numbers of people who cared enough to stay, who found each other, who made their shared concern visible, and who, by doing so, changed both the social environment around them and eventually the beliefs of people who had never signed a petition or attended a march.
You do not need to save the world alone. You can change things by finding others. And the compassion that you feel is precisely what makes that possible.
If the state of the world is affecting your mental health, whether through climate anxiety, moral injury, or the psychological weight of sustained attention to difficult global realities, these are legitimate things to bring to therapy. The team at Excel Psychology is here. We offer individual therapy for adults at our Spring Hill, Brisbane clinic and via Telehealth Australia-wide. No referral is required.
References
Bloom, P. (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Ecco Press.
Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing.
Bursztyn, L., Cantoni, D., Yang, D. Y., Yuchtman, N., & Zhang, Y. J. (2021). Persistent political engagement: Social interactions and the dynamics of protest movements. American Economic Review: Insights, 3(4), 233–250. https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20200261
Chenoweth, E., & Stephan, M. J. (2011). Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Columbia University Press.
Chödrön, P. (1997). When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Shambhala Publications.
Gallup. (1964). Americans narrowly OK’d 1964 Civil Rights Law. Gallup Historical Vault.
Gallup. (2025). Record party divide ten years after same-sex marriage ruling. Gallup.
Kuran, T. (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Harvard University Press.
Noelle-Neumann, E. (1974). The spiral of silence: A theory of public opinion. Journal of Communication, 24(2), 43–51.
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. (1991). Public opinion on civil rights: Reflections on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cornell University.
Seligman, M. E. P., & Maier, S. F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(1), 1–9.
van Zomeren, M., Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (2008). Toward an integrative social identity model of collective action: A quantitative research synthesis of three socio-psychological perspectives. Psychological Bulletin, 134(4), 504–535.
