Adults in the United States were more likely to perceive that people in America favored legal access to abortion after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade than before it, according to new research from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. 

The finding appeared in “Effects of a US Supreme Court ruling to restrict abortion rights,” published recently in Nature Human Behaviour.

While evidence did not show that the ruling influenced personal attitudes about the legality or morality of abortion, the shift in perceived norms has the potential to cause behavioral change, the Princeton researchers said. 

“There is a wealth of research that our perceptions of social norms — of what others think is typical or desirable in our communities — can influence our choices and our behavior,” said co-author Betsy Levy Paluck, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs and deputy director of SPIA’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy. “If you live in a place you believe favors abortion, even if you feel personally out of step with that belief, that can influence whether you might speak out about it or feel comfortable trying to persuade others to your side.”

Ahead of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case in 2022, Chelsey S. Clark, a doctoral student in the Joint Degree Program in Social Policy who works with Paluck, saw an opportunity to expand her research on how signals of social norms affect personal beliefs. 

When a draft of the majority opinion leaked more than a month ahead of the official ruling — an extremely rare occurrence — the researchers were initially caught off guard. But they believe it ultimately created an even greater opportunity to study how the ruling would impact public opinion because it brought more attention to the case. 

“This data collection is unique because of the leak,” said Clark, the article’s lead author.

The leaked opinion was not the only factor that made the Dobbs decision unusual, and unusually ripe for this type of research project. The ruling ran against prevailing public opinion and restricted individual rights instead of expanding them. According to the article, previous research about the relationship between Supreme Court rulings and the public’s attitudes and perceptions typically focused on rulings that achieved the opposite, such as the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. 

“Something exciting about this project was that we could imagine it going any way,” Clark said. “Drawing from the research literature, I can’t think of any that looks at a ruling that both runs against the majority in public opinion and also limits rights.”

The researchers wanted to learn if the Court’s decision would influence personal attitudes, norm perceptions, and views on the legality of abortion directly, through the ruling itself, or indirectly, through observations based on the public’s reaction via traditional and social media. 

The latter proved to be true, according to Clark and Paluck. The research showed that after the Court’s ruling, which triggered a wealth of attention to the issue, the public shifted its perception based on the reaction they observed — an indirect influence. Unlike other large polling that has looked at the longer-term correlational effects of the ruling, the quasi-experimental design of this study allowed researchers to look at the immediate impact of the Court decision on public opinion.

“After the ruling, we found that our study participants believed Americans were more supportive of abortion, which moved the norms in the opposite direction of the Court,” said Paluck, whose research on social norms and networks has focused on Supreme Court cases as well as school cliques, Rwandan genocide, and other subjects. 

The study examined perceptions of not only abortion but also the Supreme Court itself, and the largest impact of the Dobbs decision was, researchers found, increasingly polarized perceptions of the Court. Following both the leaked and official opinions, the perceived legitimacy of the Court decreased among Democrats and increased among Republicans. Democrats also showed increased support for Court reform. The findings contradicted long-standing theories about the stability of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, the researchers write. 

“Some theories of the Court predict the Court is above public opinion and can act how it wants without seriously affecting its reputation,” Clark said. “There have been many examples of this, but we found that the perception of the Court’s legitimacy is not as robust as was once thought.”

In the year following the Dobbs ruling, public opinion toward abortion has grown more favorable. Gallup polls record elevated support for legal abortion, with a majority of Americans now saying for the first time ever that abortion is “morally acceptable.” The issue of abortion has also become widely recognized as a galvanizing political force that helps Democrats and presents challenges for Republicans.

“We are exquisitely sensitive to what others think,” said Paluck, whose insights into how perceptions of social norms can alter behavior helped her earn a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2017. “After a big ruling by the Supreme Court, we are not necessarily looking at others to make sense of our own ideas or to find out how we personally think. We look around to find out what other Americans think. It’s important to know if you are the only person in the room who supports or opposes an issue like abortion.”