Runaway rights: How rights become expanded, adopted, and coopted

We are in an age of rights, in the sense that major social and political movements use the rhetoric of rights (not duties), including women’s rights, Black rights, gay rights, and animal rights. This paper explores runaway rights, the trend of extending rights to more and more domains, and using the language of rights in social contestations. This accelerating profusion of different kinds of rights is integral to contemporary culture and is underwritten by powerful moral arguments, such as the pursuit of social justice or environmental protection. Nevertheless, if the beneficial effects of fast emerging rights are to be safeguarded, the process of rights proliferation must be better understood. Here we advance a psychological framework for understanding the causes and consequences of runaway rights, suggesting a set of testable hypotheses based on this framework. We argue that the process of establishing new rights entails six stages, with each stage characterized by particular psychological processes at individual and group levels. During ‘rights initiated’ (Stage 1), perception, categorization, and labeling are the associated psychological processes, with norm formation occurring at the group level. ‘Rights expansion’ (Stage 2) involves minority-majority processes of norm contestation. During the normalization of a new right (Stage 3), associated psychological processes are normative influence, conformity, and obedience. ‘Strategic adoption’ (Stage 4) expands the right to people who initially may have opposed it, with associated psychological processes involving minority influence and leadership. During Stage 5 the original right becomes revised, adapted, and expanded, through psychological processes involving creativity, social differentiation, and factionalism. Finally, Stage 6 involves ‘backlash and countering’ from those who oppose rights extension and counter with competing rights, with associated social comparison, relative deprivation, and mutual radicalization processes. At this point, we would argue, power holders seek to initiate a new struggle over terms or rights, returning the process to Stage 1. Building on this six-stage model, we propose a novel explanation for the recent emergence of the ‘runaway rights’ phenomenon and discuss its empirical needs and wider implications.