In the summer of 2026, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, and the Governance of Organizations Working Group at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University jointly conducted a nationwide survey of 2,807—representative by gender, race, age, household income, and region of residence—to understand how the American public views CEOs who take public positions on environmental, social, and political issues. This survey is a follow up of a similar survey conducted in 2018.
Key findings include:
- Public support for CEO activism declines
- Support depends heavily on the issue: environmental advocacy remains popular, while political and contentious social advocacy does not
- Younger Americans are more cautious about CEO advocacy concerning artificial intelligence
- Americans are hypersensitive to and have lasting recall of CEO activism—eliciting positive and negative reactions
- Consumers report increasingly changing their purchasing behavior in response to CEO activism
- Implications for executives and boards