Collective action is a key driver of social and political change within societies. So far, the main factor mobilizing individuals into collective action remains the extent to which they feel identified with a protesting group (i.e., social identification). Although the link between social identification and collective action is well-established, current evidence relies mostly on self-report data. To tackle this issue, we combined real-life protest counts in the United States (2017–2020) with online search data (Google Trends) for pronouns indicating a “group” mind-set (first-person plural pronouns; e.g., “we,” “us”). Time series analyses indicated that weekly fluctuations in searches (N = 164) predict both protest and protester counts over time. Confirmatory mixed models then showed that a 1% increase in pronoun searches was linked with +13.67% protests (95% CI [4.02, 23.32]) and +47.45% protesters (95% CI [26.54, 68.36]) the following week. These original results have important implications for the ecological study and quantification of collective action dynamics in psychology.

集体行动是社会内部社会和政治变革的主要动力。到目前为止，动员个人采取集体行动的主要因素仍然是他们感到被抗议团体认同的程度（即社会认同）。尽管社会认同与集体行动之间的联系已经确立，但目前的证据主要依靠自我报告数据。为了解决这个问题，我们将美国（2017-2020年）的真实抗议次数与在线搜索数据（Google趋势）相结合，以表明代词具有“群体”思维定式（第一人称复数代词；例如，“ ，“ “我们”）。时间序列分析表明，每周搜索量波动（N= 164）预测随着时间的推移抗议者和抗议者的人数。然后，验证性混合模型显示代词搜索量增加1％与接下来一周的+ 13.67％抗议（95％CI [4.02，23.32]）和+ 47.45％抗议者（95％CI [26.54，68.36]）相关。这些原始结果对心理学的集体行动动力学的生态学研究和量化具有重要意义。