Who <em>Really</em> Protests, and Why?

In 2020, two major protest movements defined our political landscape: the racial-justice protests after the murder of George Floyd and the anti-lockdown protests pushing against COVID-19 restrictions.

At the time, these movements were seen by many as near-polar opposites and were often defined by their extremes. For the police-brutality protests, images of Minneapolis on fire and demands for total police abolition seemed to define the movement. For the anti-lockdown protests, militiamen with firearms in and around state capitols were among the most striking visuals. And an association with fringe right-wing groups marred the public-health protests with a sense of extremism.

But research from economist Nick Papageorge complicates these findings. Along with his co-authors, Papageorge ran surveys in the summer of 2020 that captured demographic and ideological information about the people who participated in these movements. Much to Papageorge’s surprise, his findings revealed significant overlap between the BLM and anti-lockdown protest movements. And—on some metrics—the paper reveals that the protesters were not out of touch with the majority of Americans. Rather, they were more representative of the country than even the 2020 electorate.

In this episode of Good on Paper, I speak with Papageorge, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who largely works at the intersection of public health and economics.

“There has been this notion of, Maybe it’s just fun. Protesting is the new brunch was one of the things that came out,” Papageorge said. “And I think that was one part of the caricaturization, right? That there are these gun-toting vigilantes protesting. And then there were these privileged leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. And that just wasn’t in line with what we were finding. The median protester was not an extremist.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where much of my written work begins with seeing a new working paper come out and following it down a research rabbit hole.

An exciting, new finding is always great, but the most important work is figuring out how it sits in the context of the rest of our knowledge base. What is it adding? Where does it depart from consensus?

And particularly when we’re talking about new findings in economics—those often come from early versions of papers, before all the levels of review have been completed, so there’s an extra, added level of scrutiny you have to have.

There’s one such paper that’s been stuck in my brain since I first saw it come into my inbox more than two years ago—one that upended much of my thinking around the protests in 2020.

The paper is called, “Who Protests, What Do They Protest, and Why?” and it focuses on the demographic and ideological characteristics of protesters in two major social movements: The BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd and the anti-lockdown protests that came in response to restrictive COVID-19 rules.

The paper finds that nearly 30 percent of protesters attended both a BLM and a lockdown protest, indicating significant overlap in the types of people attracted to both movements—and the research shows that these people are protestors, not counterprotesters. This finding really surprised me and made me question my priors about what kinds of people were attracted to these movements.

Now, it’s not possible to talk about protests without thinking about those that rocked college campuses this year. While this conversation doesn’t touch on those protests, because we taped it in the spring, the research still has some lessons in it for those drawing large conclusions about who’s protesting and why, and whether contemporaneous media reports can give us an accurate picture of chaotic events.

The stakes of misunderstanding the composition of protesters are high: Who we think is protesting drives how we respond to them. Who we think make up social movements affects whether our leaders react to them, and how. And, most importantly, for me, as a journalist, my own misunderstandings of what the 2020 protests were shaped my thinking about public-health restrictions and whether they had gone too far.

[Music]

I asked the lead author of that paper to come help me think through all of this. Nick Papageorge is an economist at Johns Hopkins University, where he mostly focuses on the intersection of public health and economics.

Let’s dive in.

Demsas: All right. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Papageorge: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So I want to take us back to spring of 2020. It was a really scary time. COVID-19 was in full swing. We were seeing caseloads rising. I remember just being terrified. I didn’t really know what was the way to keep yourself or the people you cared about safe.

I was lucky that I got to work from home the entire time. But at the same time, it was just like there was such different, changing informational environments. It just felt very chaotic. And the advice we were all getting was just stay away from other people, stay masked, and just limit contact as much as possible.

And spring of 2020 is also when George Floyd is murdered. And in response, a nationwide movement erupted. Protests were happening in most American cities and even around the world. And all of a sudden, I have a vivid memory of seeing this open letter that’s signed by over 1,200 people—public-health professionals, infectious-disease professionals—and it’s a weird document from the time because you have them criticizing the “heavily armed and predominantly white protesters” for protesting stay-at-home orders, but then they say that, actually, the anti-racism protests were completely justifiable under public-health grounds.

Reading—quoting directly from it now—they say, “Do not disband protests under the guise of maintaining public health for COVID-19 restrictions.” And it just felt very weird to me. It felt very weird that you had public-health professionals who, ostensibly, were giving us advice about how to stay healthy now telling us that, Well, for certain things it was okay to break some of these guidelines. So what was your reaction to that letter?

Papageorge: I think if I could start at a high level, one of the critiques coming from economists—and people have an idea of what economists do, and it has to do with banks and finance and interest rates. And it turns out that what we do is a lot closer to what maybe comes into your mind when you’re thinking about what a sociologist does: We study people and behavior and factors that affect behavior, sources of inequality, and so on.

And so one of the things that really frustrated economists was there seemed to be this implied hierarchy about what was important in these public-health debates. And, of course, we don’t want people to die from a disease. At the same time, kids not going to school is really, really harmful. And I don’t know where different people are going to land in that debate, because I could certainly see somebody saying, Look, preventing any death is just the most paramount thing. I could also hear somebody saying, We need kids to go to school. That’s just the most important thing.

I can’t tell you which one of those two is the right one. What I don’t think we did was recognize this really nasty trade-off—this really brutal trade-off—and have that conversation. And then there was this implied view about what’s a worthy thing to do, and I guess it wasn’t opening schools.

Demsas: Like, what’s worth risking COVID-19?

Papageorge: Right, exactly. What’s worth risking COVID-19? And we decided—or it was decided—that, Well, okay, but going to a BLM protest is okay. And I think that undermined some credibility of some of these decisions that were made on our behalf. And I think that maybe I agreed, in a way, with that trade-off. I decided to leave the house and join a big group to go to a BLM protest. But I could see why people might have thought, Hey, wait. You’re telling me I can’t take my kid to school but that I’m allowed to go to this protest? That doesn’t seem right. Who decided that?

Demsas: I was rocked back to this. I remember vividly a couple years ago when—and I’m going to out myself as a weirdo for this, but—the National Bureau of Economic Research puts out this weekly rundown of studies, and I’ll click through them. And I remember seeing your study in 2022, when it first came out, and seeing the findings that people who attended anti-public-health protests and people who attended BLM protests, that there was a lot of overlap over those people. Can you tell us about that? How did you find that? Like, what was the process of even doing that survey?

Papageorge: It was a strange study for me. We were playing with data, and we found a pattern that didn’t make sense. And so we had to come back and figure out: What’s the question this is answering?

Demsas: Yeah. Why were you doing the survey in the first place?

Papageorge: The survey started pretty soon after the emergence of COVID-19. And Washington University got some outside funding to run a high-quality survey. I was asked to contribute some thoughts on what we might want to look at. That is because I’ve looked at infectious disease before in the economic context, in particular HIV, risky behavior, how it interacts with medication usage, and employment, and these kinds of things—these health-economic interactions.

So we started asking questions, and then the data set—we were going to go back for several rounds. And so by the time of the second round of questions, when they were asking whether we wanted to add more questions, the BLM protests had started. And so we thought, Well, we should probably collect data on whether or not people are attending them. And then—I don’t know who in the group (it might have been me; I don’t think it was)—somebody said, Well, there are these other protests going on for reopening. I don’t want to quite call them anti-public health. I think that they were maybe pro-reopening. And so—

Demsas: No, fair. That’s probably a biased way of me talking about it.

Papageorge: So there were these protests and, in my mind, there was still this caricature that these were, like, gun-toting vigilantes, and that we, Okay, sure, we should probably collect that data as well, because we’re trying to be scientists here. And I thought, Why don’t we see what’s predicting protest attendance? Obviously, you know, going to a BLM protest probably predicts not going to a reopening protest, just because that would make sense according to my bias, my priors.

And we found the opposite. And then we checked it again, and we found the opposite again, and then we really started to kick the tires. But the result didn’t go away, and so then we entered this period of thinking, Okay, maybe this is novel, and maybe we need to start to figure out why this might make sense. Economics, as a field, tries to be a little bit apolitical. I would say that one out of every five of my findings, I’m like, Oh man.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Didn’t want to find that out.

Papageorge: Didn’t want to find that. But you shouldn’t be able to tell my politics by reading my papers. But one thing I did think to myself was, I am getting frustrated by some of the public-health mandates that seem to me to be a little bit excessive.

Demsas: More than just the closing schools or other stuff?

Papageorge: Just the decisions that didn’t make, to me, a whole lot of sense, like, Okay, we’re gonna let some bars open, but we’re gonna keep the schools closed.

Demsas: Yeah, yeah.

Papageorge: And I just was like, Okay, well, what are we waiting for here? What’s the evidence, and where’s the cost-benefit analysis here?

Demsas: Yeah.

Papageorge: Like, at what point—

Demsas: And whose values are being followed?

Papageorge: Whose values are being used in that cost-benefit [analysis], right?

And so I was getting more and more concerned that, throughout this entire period, you could still get stuff off of Amazon. There’s all these people that had to still work. And they don’t have the kind of job that I have, where I can telework. And I started thinking about just the mental-health burden. I started thinking about my own kid, who, you know—he has two parents who still have jobs, but I know that he’s missing out on socialization at this critical period. These costs are starting to build up. And so I was getting frustrated, and I remember my husband saying to me, If it’s shut down again in Baltimore city, I’m going to go to join a reopening protest.

Demsas: Wow.

Papageorge: And it was kind of joking, I think, or maybe he wasn’t. I think he was serious. And we’d gone to BLM protests, and I thought that we were just really isolated in having that mixture of views. And so when I looked at the data, I thought, Oh, maybe we weren’t.

Demsas: But it’s really interesting to me that you were surprised by these findings, even though they represented your own views.

Papageorge: That’s totally true. But that’s one of the things also, I think—and maybe I’m just conditioned to be like this with science, to really remove myself from my science. And so I don’t necessarily assume that folks—I think that’s one of the biggest dangers in sciences, especially in the social sciences, is thinking that your views are representative, that your opinions are shared by others. I think a lot of good social science comes when you step back and listen to other people and make sure you’re not speaking for them, but maybe elevating their voices.

Demsas: Well, let’s dig in a little bit into some of the findings here on the numbers. So, 33 percent of BLM protesters identified as Republicans, and 36 percent of reopening protesters as Democrats. I mean, just generally stepping back, if I think about how these were characterized, we think about BLM protests as a left-wing movement and the reopening protest as a right-wing movement. So when you actually look at who is involved in these protests, what are you actually seeing? Who are these people? And where is the overlap?

Papageorge: Right. So, if you go to a BLM protest, or if you report having gone to a BLM protest, they tended to be a little more Democratic. And then the reopening protests tended to be a little bit more Republican. But then there was this mixture, right? There were plenty of Republicans at BLM protests, and there were plenty of Democrats at these reopening protests, which again, I thought was a little bit strange.

But I do remember in the early days of the BLM protests, it wasn’t the same movement that it is today, which I think it’s become much more politicized. You know, you remember Mitt Romney was joining in these protests. There was this outrage from a lot of different places that was collective. The other thing that we found interesting is that people who protested tended to be working in person and have children, which you would think, These are things that are going to make me not want to protest. We also found that people and different measures of well-being were higher.

Demsas: Like higher well-being meant you were more likely to go to a protest?

Papageorge: Yes.

Demsas: Yeah, okay.

Papageorge: Which again, you wonder, Isn’t it frustration and anger that drives you to protest? But then there is precedent in earlier research saying that people might go to protests and then feel good. Maybe they feel like they have some say, they have some agency here. Maybe it was cathartic to go to the protest. Or we could just be thinking that people who are energetic and feeling good about themselves are the kinds of people who will go to a protest, as well.

Demsas: Yeah.

Papageorge: I think that if one reflects a little bit on it, it makes sense that folks who might’ve been really frustrated with the state of things were folks who were working and who were worried about losing their job. These are also parents who have lost their childcare arrangements, which was incredibly frustrating. But I can also imagine those same parents saying, I don’t want my kid to grow up in a world where this kind of violence happens. And so that was another set of findings.

One thing that we found strange was that people who saw themselves at greater risk of COVID-19 were more likely to go to protests.

Demsas: I found this super interesting. So first of all, you’re just asking the question: How scared are you of dying, of getting sick? Or how are you determining that?

Papageorge: So you can do different things. One is kind of more objective, where you can just look at the county caseloads or county reports. And, if I remember correctly, we have a positive correlation with it, but a lot of that can just be, Hey, there were more protests available in places where there were higher rates, right? Maybe bigger cities or whatever.

You can also ask people about their beliefs. Now, doing that is always wacky, so we got sort of wacky answers there.

Demsas: You got high numbers, right? Like, 30 percent chance of death?

Papageorge: Exactly. But in our defense, anybody who looks to get beliefs data, it’s really tricky to do that. And people answer in a very wacky way.

Demsas: But also if you asked me in June 2020, what I thought the risk of death from COVID was—I remember my dad, who always, every year around June gets really bad allergies. My dad has really bad ones. I remember him calling me like, Hey, I feel kind of sick. And I just freaked out. I went to his apartment, and I just dropped off—I’d just been on Twitter, looking up random virologists and being like, Are they using Motrin? Are they using Tylenol? Are they using—you know what I mean? So there’s a level where I think I would have said, Oh my gosh, I’m acting like I think my father’s going to die, you know? And so I don’t know how I would have evaluated that.

Papageorge: Yeah, I think that’s right. There is a whole lot of research on how to collect these kinds of data. And if you want to do it well, you have to do it really carefully, kind of anchoring people. For example, people are really bad at small probabilities. So maybe something that’s, like, 0.1-percent chance, they’ll think it’s 10. And to them, it’s the same number.

Demsas: It just means small. Yeah.

Papageorge: But I mean, these are massively different numbers. I think if I remember, on average, people thought there was a 30-percent chance that they would get COVID-19, which maybe that’s not so bad. But then they think if you get COVID-19, there’s a 30 percent chance of dying. And you’re thinking, Okay.

Demsas: And that’s if they go to the protest?

Papageorge: No, no. This is just in general. So you’re thinking, Okay, this is really high. But we did find that people who saw themselves at greater risk of COVID-19 were more likely to go to the protests, which that in itself doesn’t surprise me, because that could just be a recognition that, you know, I do risky things. And so, that actually checks out.

Demsas: So, you find that 28 percent of protesters attended both a reopening protest and a BLM protest. One hypothesis raised when I first read this paper was: Maybe there are just certain kinds of people who like to protest, or not like it as an activity but have a high propensity to just protest if it’s something that’s available in their area.

And I was looking into the literature on this, and there’s a study by a sociologist at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. Her name is Michelle Petrie, and she looks at the determinants of protest participation. And one thing she brings up is this concept called biographical availability, which is basically whether someone has the time, particularly unstructured time, where they feel like they’re less at risk of being surveilled or facing consequences for engaging in protest.

And she cites Doug McAdam, who has this paper about the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, and he finds that then the people who participated largely came from affluent families, where they were in their early 20s. It’s summer, so they didn’t have jobs. They were unemployed, unlikely to be married.

I mean, in your sense, is it what’s going on here? It feels like there’s two potential hypotheses—and maybe they’re both true. One is that there’s a large overlap on these ideologies between people who were concerned about anti-police brutality and people who were worried about reopening and public-health restrictions. But it’s also possible that a lot of people are just like, Maybe I’ll just protest. You know what I mean? And so how do you tease that out?

Papageorge: I think it’s hard to tease out, is the first thing. And I think that there is this notion of biographical availability. Certain people are just going to be more likely to protest. And that’s something that we spend a lot of time doing. That’s why we look at these predictors. What are the factors that seem to predict protest attendance?

And I think the story’s a bit nuanced because, Okay, sure. Younger? That makes sense. That checks out. But having kids and also working in person? That does not. And then there was also and has been this notion of, you know, Maybe it’s just fun. “Protesting is the new brunch” was one of the things that came out.

And I think that was one part of the caricaturization, right? That there are these gun-toting vigilantes protesting. And then there were these privileged, leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. And that just wasn’t in line with what we were finding. The median protester was not an extremist. The median protester was not somebody who had plenty of time on their hands or plenty of affluence, and so they don’t even need to worry about working. People seem to be overcoming obstacles to get there. And so that’s got to be at least part of the story.

We also were able to look at police shootings in the area where these folks were, and that seemed to be also predictive.

Demsas: So if there were more police shootings, they’re more likely—

Papageorge: If there were more police shootings, you were more likely to go to BLM, exactly. And so that seems to suggest that this isn’t just a leisure activity, but something that people are taking seriously.

[Music]

Demsas: Okay, we’re going to take a quick break, but more with Nick when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: This is something I find with economists a lot when I’m talking to them, that there’s a lot of frustration that, in many ways, our official apparatuses don’t take into account costs like fun—

Papageorge: (Laughs.)

Demsas: Things that you like to do that make your life happy. The trade-off, of course: We wanted people to stop dying and, especially at the very beginning, when we had no information, it makes a lot of sense to shut down a lot of things.

But it’s interesting to think back again to that letter we talked about at the beginning because, in many ways, that letter was actually the way you would want public-health officials to engage with trade-offs. Because they go into it, and they say, Yes, of course, there are concerns with catching COVID-19 in public spaces. But also, people have a legitimate concern about protesting and about anti-racism. Our goal, as public-health professionals, is to provide them the tools to do mitigation of that kind of damage. And it was like, Where is that trade-off thinking in any other space?

Papageorge: Right. No, that’s what I think was so—and to be fair to people in public health, and I work now with some epidemiologists, there is now this call, in general for, Okay, we need to figure out a way to think about these trade-offs more carefully.

Obviously, there are some folks who still think any one death is worth just infinity and therefore anything else is just secondary. Fine. That’s what they think. I just don’t. One reason: We know poverty is deadly, so you’re not comparing apples to oranges.

And so what it really comes down to is it’s kind of, Whose life matters more? And I think that’s really hard when you’re comparing, say, my somewhere-in-her-70s mom and a low-income kid in the city. And, you know, whose life matters? Well, both. But you’re going to put a policy together that’s going to probably harm one person less than the other. And I think it’s really hard to think about that.

Demsas: Yeah. And, to me, there were so many times during the pandemic where I felt the way that public-health professionals—the value system in place—was sort of what I later learned is called the precautionary principle. It is this idea—“do no harm” is the very simple way of doing it, of just saying, Okay, whatever you actually are going to do, make sure—99.999 percent sure, even 100 percent sure—that anything you do is not going to cause harm. And that means let’s not approve tests if we’re not 100 percent sure that they’re going to be perfectly accurate or at a really high level of accuracy, even though the status quo is that we have no tests. People have no way of figuring out whether or not they might be infected.

And I wonder, do you think that the finding that you’re having in this paper, and also the research you’ve done in other spaces, is that pushing the public-health field to think differently? Or are you seeing any kind of changes at all in the public-health field in response to how many people felt that trade-offs weren’t really adequately considered during 2020?

Papageorge: So I absolutely think that this paper and other work I’ve done pushes against this idea that, in public-health contexts, health is the only thing to think about. I’ve made a whole career off of thinking about the way that health interacts with other factors that are important to us. We’re not health maximizers. We might have been. I mean, you can imagine some creatures living in some other planet that the only thing they care about is their health.

Demsas: They’re living on Soylent.

Papageorge: Longevity is the only thing you care about. I mean, just any decision we make on any given day shows that that’s not true. We leave our house. We eat fried foods. We drink. We get into cars. We get on planes. We do all sorts of things that show that we are not health maximizers. We’re lots-of-things maximizers. Health is one of them. We would rather be healthy than not healthy if it were for free. The thing is, it’s not for free.

And so I think that there has been some movement towards, How can we do this better and just recognize that there are these trade-offs? And I think the subtle point is to say that I don’t really care where you come down on that trade-off or where I come down on the trade-off; I want to present that trade-off.

Demsas: Yeah.

Papageorge: And then politics can kind of decide—

Demsas: Yeah.

Papageorge: Where we go from there.

Demsas: So, returning to politics then, because I think another part of your paper that really would be great to delve into is a finding that the protesters, on some axes, were more representative of the public than even the 2020 voting electorate. And it’s not on all of them.

So you find on age and income, the protesters were younger—much younger—and then slightly more low-income than the voting population and the general public. But then on gender and race, the protesting population is more representative of the public than voters.

So, when you see this, why do you think those distinctions are happening? Why on gender and race is that happening versus age and income?

Papageorge: I don’t know why one versus the other, though I know that younger people might not be as trustful about traditional modes of expressing themselves.

Voting: I think there’s some disillusionment. We know that voting is on a certain day, and there are lots of requirements that are maybe easier to navigate if you have more income or more work flexibility, which oftentimes is going to correlate to higher income. I mean, if I leave for three hours from my job, no one’s gonna really even ask me where I’ve gone, whereas that’s just absolutely not the case with people who are working hourly.

And so, if you then have these protests sprouting up, and the only thing you need to do—you don’t have to bring your ID; you don’t have to make sure you registered a few weeks ago or whatever—you just go.

Demsas: But you outlined for us earlier that these were people who thought it was costly to protest. And, for them, you said it’s more likely that they’re working in person, and they’re going. So I was surprised, right? Because, to me, it would indicate these are people who clearly feel like there is some value to protesting, whether it’s just expressive, whether it’s communal, whether it’s actually trying to enact change, or some combination of those three. They were willing to overcome things that were, to themselves, costly. But then with voting, you don’t see that happening.

Papageorge: Right. And I think a lot of that is just because you have one day. Suppose I work four or five days a week at a restaurant, and the hours are a little bit wacky, and Tuesday’s the day you got to work. And that’s that, whereas—

Demsas: The protests were kind of going on.

Papageorge: The protests were going on. And so there’s going to be a day when you can make it. And I think that this is probably a lesson that we should be thinking a little bit about, which is: Why do people like to mail-in vote? Because it means you don’t have to do it on a certain day at a certain time. In general, what we were trying to show is these weren’t, like, weirdos who just are entirely unrepresentative. These were really typical Americans. And I think that what we wanted to take away from that was that we don’t get to ignore them by caricaturizing them.

Demsas: Yeah.

Papageorge: And I think that was something that some corners of the media did, and I think that was very unfortunate because it cheapened the message. It cheapened the will, the agency that people have.

Demsas: I think this is actually the place where the stakes of this misunderstanding and caricature are really, really high. Because the BLM protests—I thought they were cross-racial. I saw a lot of white people participating in them, a lot of Black people, a lot of people from different backgrounds. I thought they were mostly young. But I saw a lot of men. I saw a lot of women. And I thought it was largely representative.

But I still had, you know, the image in my head of the Minneapolis police precinct on fire, or people talking about Seattle, where there was that kind of really radical zone of people. And then with the public-health protests, I thought it was even more biased. I think I saw, you know, militia members in state houses and assumed that’s what’s going on there.

And the stakes of that are really bad because if you realize that these groups of people are actually representative and not just not your average person, then that changes how we talk about it as the media. It changes how politicians respond to it.

And it’s interesting. I mean, I haven’t really worked through this myself, so maybe we can do it here. But in some ways—I mean, there’s now a new paper by Amory Gethin and Vincent Pons. Their paper—it’s an NBER working paper—that indicates that BLM protests in 2020 did actually really affect public opinion and made people more likely to oppose police brutality, become more quote-unquote liberal on racial-justice issues.

But they’re finding that also BLM is one of the only protests in their sample that actually has a sustained effect. And I imagine it’s because the other ones were not as widespread. And so, in that case, people did affect change despite these caricatures.

And with reopening, I feel like it’s harder to tell because obviously we reopened, but was it because of the protesters? How do you think about it? Because in some cases you can be pessimistic and say, These characters that exist really prevented these groups from getting what they wanted done. But there’s some evidence that shows that despite the way that they were covered and maybe popularly understood, people still really were able to get certain policy things enacted.

Papageorge: Yeah, I think both things can be true at the same time. I think BLM certainly did have an effect. It did morph a little bit into a different movement, and I think the idea of, like, defunding the police became much more prevalent. And I don’t think that’s where the original protests might have been, but I think that the original coalition of people—this very ideologically diverse set of people—would maybe say, Yeah, well, some things have happened. It’s much more on the radar. The idea of police reform, I think, is much more reasonable to hear about in different corners, and when before, maybe that would’ve been a little bit more of an extreme view.

In terms of public health, I think it’s really hard, like you said, to understand what were the effects of those protests. Because vaccines were coming around, and that was probably what was going to happen. This technology was going to just change. But at the same time, when I started getting into this idea of behavior and it being a really important part of epidemiological models—you know, when you’re trying to follow a pathogen, you need to understand the interaction with human beings—that was controversial to people in those spaces. It was controversial to certain experts to say, Look, you don’t necessarily need to shut down everything, because people are going to protect themselves. And I think these—

Demsas: Yeah, wasn’t there some data that people, before orders actually were in place, were already staying at home?

Papageorge: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so the idea is, okay, How do you take account of that when you’re deciding what you’re going to close? So I think, in a way, that some of these—I don’t know if it was the protests per se—but I would say that we’ve absolutely seen a change in some of the views that people hold. Not everybody, but I think that folks have said, Wow, we really didn’t think about that trade-off. We didn’t do behavior well. We didn’t figure that out.

Demsas: Well, how generalizable do you think your findings that you have about the BLM protests or the reopening protests are to protests writ large, right? Is it the case that like, you know, you’re in June 2020, COVID-19 health precautions have sort of ensured that, in many ways, there’s a large number of people who are doing self-limiting behaviors such that they’re able to participate in protests? Or maybe the costs were just so high, at the time, to not engaging in protests that people were willing to do it.

But I feel like there’s a lot of protests out there that are not like this. I feel like they are a really small group, and maybe no one’s just done your analysis yet to figure out that they’re very representative people, but I don’t know. Sometimes I just see things, I’m like, That just seems like 20 people who are on this issue. Like, That does not feel like a regular thing. So, how do you think about why these ones felt this way versus what most protests look like?

Papageorge: I think that if I’m a good scientist, I’m going to say, I don’t know how generalizable this is, because that was a very unique moment in our history, where you have these movements occurring and data collected at just the right time.

And so, in one sense, I would say it’s not generalizable at all, but then you start to look. And I started to question this kind of received wisdom that we’re just hopelessly at odds with one another, that there are these, like, extremists, and there’s this polarization happening, and it’s just relentlessly growing. And I started to think, Maybe that’s not true, right? I mean, it sounds like it if you turn on the TV. But I started to question it. And I started to wonder, How much of this is manufactured polarization? How much of this is just not really necessarily there?

And I think abortion is one of these issues, right, where the median American wants abortion rights with some restrictions. And I am very pro-choice in my views. I, for a long time, thought if anybody’s not 100 percent pro-choice, then they’re the enemy. And I, after all of this, started to think, Was that the right stance? If somebody said to me, Abortion’s complicated for me. I think I’m a little pro-life. I understand that there should be different circum—whatever, whatever. Maybe I shouldn’t have seen that as the enemy, but maybe I should have been thinking, Is there common ground?

I think that there are certain areas in my life where I don’t have a lot of room to budge. Like, if somebody says to me, Two gay men shouldn’t have a kid, I’m like, There’s nothing for me to say here, because it’s my kid. And there’s no room for me to be like, Oh, I guess it’s okay if you take him away just a little bit.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Papageorge: I mean, that’s just—we’re done. But I think that on a lot of other issues, there’s a lot more room to just recognize that we can do something together. And I wasn’t ready for that before, and now I think I am.

Demsas: Well, that feels like a great place to close out. Our last question is always the same: What is an idea that you thought was good on paper, but when it came to real life, maybe it didn’t pan out the way you thought?

Papageorge: Okay. I was trying to think of one that would be appropriate to say. (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.) We’ve gotten a couple weird ones already.

Papageorge: I don’t want to lose my job or something.

Demsas: No, yeah.

Papageorge: No. I’m just kidding. So I was just thinking about parenting, and how I think I’m an okay parent. But I lack the instincts that my husband has. He is very nurturing and sweet and just gets it with kids.

And so the kid was having trouble sleeping, even though he’s a champion sleeper. So I am taking the kid home and singing the monkey-who-bumps-his-head song, and I thought it would be just brilliant to change the animals around. So we did bears and cats and dogs. And then I got to snakes, and my kid sang along with me until he got to two snakes. And then he just turns and starts crying and saying, I don’t want snakes in my bed.

And I just remember having to call my husband and tell him. He’s like, What did you do? Because he’s used to me being stupid.

Demsas: Yeah.

Papageorge: And his boss was there, and the phone was on speaker. And she’s like, Now I’m afraid to go to sleep. I was just like, Wow, I’m really bad at this.

Demsas: Well, does your kid sleep now?

Papageorge: Yeah, he’s fine.

Demsas: Well, then, you know—

Papageorge: It’s all fine. (Laughs.)

Demsas: It’s all fine. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Nick. This has been a fantastic conversation.

[Music]

Papageorge: Thanks so much for having me and for all these interesting questions.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please follow the show, and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Or share it with two friends who you think might like it.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Demsas: All right. Guys, do we need any retakes, or are we good?

Okay, so you didn’t mess up. I messed up. Congratulations.

Papageorge: (Laughs.)