prof. dr. M. (Martijn) van Zomeren

Research statement

My theorizing and research has focused mainly on the psychology of social protest to achieve social change, exemplified by peaceful demonstations and petitions (e.g., against cuts on higher education, climate change, discrimination of minorities, etc.), but also violent uprisings and revolts (e.g., Egypt, Tunesia, Libya). In my and my collaborators' theorizing and research in this domain, I seek to integrate different theoretical perspectives. In the Dual Chamber Model (Agostini & Van Zomeren, 2021), for example, we model the relationships between four core motivations for social protest: group identity, morality, injustce, and efficacy.

==> Agostini, M., & van Zomeren, M. (2021). Toward a comprehensive and potentially cross-cultural model of why people engage in collective action: A quantitative research synthesis of four motivations and structural constraints. Psychological Bulletin, 147(7), 667.

==> Leal, A., van Zomeren, M., González, R., Gordijn, E., Carozzi, P., Reifen-Tagar, M., ... & Halperin, E. (in press, 2025). Attitude moralization in the context of collective action: How participation in collective action may foster moralization over time. Journal of personality and social psychology.

I am also interested in the (in)effectiveness of social protest and which tactics are more or less likely to achieve social change (e.g. Shuman et al., 2024). Combining the motivational and strategic aspects of social protest, in 2025 my new monograph will be published at Oxford University Press, entitled Social Protest: The Psychological Science and Practical Art of Motivation and Mobilization.

==> Shuman, E., Goldenberg, A., Saguy, T., Halperin, E., & van Zomeren, M. (2024). When are social protests effective? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(3), 252-263.

==> Van Zomeren, M. (in press, 2025). Social protest: The psychological science and practical art of motivation and mobilization. Oxford University Press.

A third focus of mine in this domain is to better understand the political and cultural psychology of social protest. In 2025, an edited book, published by Routledge, will appear entitled "The social and political psychology of social protest across and within cultures".

==> Van Zomeren, M. (Ed., 2025, in press). The social and political psychology of social protest across and within cultures. Routledge.

Together with my colleagues, I have developed a theoretically integrative model called the intergroup value protection model (Van Zomeren et al., 2024), which explains how polarization in Western democracies set in motion core psychological processes  that can turn intergroup conflict into moralized conflict.

==> van Zomeren, M., d’Amore, C., Pauls, I. L., Shuman, E., & Leal, A. (2024). The Intergroup Value Protection Model: A theoretically integrative and dynamic approach to intergroup conflict escalation in democratic societies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 28(2), 225-248.

==>  D'Amore, C., van Zomeren, M., & Koudenburg, N. (in press, 2025). How perceived polarization predicts attitude moralization (and vice versa): A four-wave longitudinal study during the 2020 US election. Journal of personality and social psychology.

Across all this other work, I am in the process of developing a relational-psychological theory of motivation. My new book connects my earlier thinking (Van Zomeren, 2016) on humans as fundamentally relational beings with what I think we know and do not know yet about social protest (Van Zomeren, 2025). This results, in essence, in the proposal for a new relational actor model that integrates the rational actor and identity-based approaches to social protest that have dominated the field in different eras.

==> Van Zomeren, M. (2015). Collective action as relational interaction: A new relational hypothesis on how non-activists become activists. New Ideas in Psychology, 39, 1-11.

==> Van Zomeren, M. (2016). From self to social relationships: An essentially relational perspective on social motivation. Cambridge University Press.

Finally, I am interested in theorizing, and in particular how researchers can move toward more integrative theorizing against the backdrop of the incredible amount of empirical fragmentation in psychology (Van Zomeren, 2016). I have developed a practical guide for researchers (Van Zomeren, 2024) that offers different steps to explore whether and how to select and integrate different theories, and why this will move us forward. 

==> Van Zomeren, M. (2016). Building a Tower of Babel? Integrating core motivations and features of social structure into the political psychology of political action. Political Psychology, 37, 87-114.

==> van Zomeren, M. (2024). The ACES guide for researchers in psychology: Fostering researchers’ informed decision-making about theory selection and theoretical integration. Review of General Psychology, 28(1), 17-29.