Human Rights Psychology: Evidence-based Approaches to Framing Human Rights Campaigns
Last week I attended the University of Dayton’s Social Practice of Human Rights conference, mentioned here earlier this summer. It was a great chance for me to immerse myself in human rights during a too busy first semester of teaching. I heard human rights presentations from political scientists, communications and psychology researchers, human rights advocates and more. There were many interesting and timely discussions, including panels about human rights-based approaches to human rights funding (this links to video of the panel presentation) and the new sustainable development goals (again, this links to a video of the panel presentation). However, for me some of the most interesting presentations were about ongoing empirical studies on how to frame a human rights violation to best effectuate action, both at the individual and state level, which I describe briefly below. A link to the full conference program, with links to paper abstracts and videos, is available here.
How many times a semester are you asked about the best approaches for promoting human rights and framing violations of human rights here in the U.S. to bring the necessary attention to achieve real change? In response, up until now, I have usually suggested readings about campaigns that have succeeded, such as the fight for gay marriage and the fair food labor campaign headed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, as well as readings about human rights framing and messaging. Yet, there is a growing number of political and other scientists working on compiling evidence regarding this topic and I had the pleasure of hearing from a few of them last week. For example, a team of researchers from the College of Wooster presented in Dayton on their experiments designed to test the efficacy of gendered human rights campaigns. The group concluded that the strategic manipulation of gender images and stereotypes to increase consensus and action on human rights issues was ineffective. This same team from the College of Wooster has also recently studied three types of messaging campaigns used by human rights organizations—informational (to increase awareness), personal (narratives on the plight of an individual or group of individuals), and motivational (creating feelings of agency and efficacy). Between the three types of messaging campaigns, the group concluded that “personal narratives are the most consistently successful, increasing individuals’ sense of knowledge on the issue and their emotional reaction to the issue, leading them to reject the practice and participate in a campaign to demand its cessation.”
Another team from the University of Maryland presented on their research and experiments testing the effects of four prominent human rights justifications—religion, international human rights law, human suffering, and human dignity—on human rights attitudes and commitments to participate in human rights advocacy. The Maryland team concluded that “the quest for some justification for human rights with universal appeal may be misguided,” explaining that their research indicates that different arguments appeal to different types of people. This same team has compared the effects of textual narratives and visual imagery on human rights attitudes and commitments to participate in human rights advocacy, concluding that “imagery depicting human rights abuse does not have a greater impact on individual human rights attitudes and willingness to act than narratives alone.”
There were of course questions raised about the research methodology, the data itself (including the fact that the Maryland team found that religious framing of human rights abuses led to decreased commitments from religious people), and more, but I definitely plan to keep my eye on these teams of researchers and the growing set of evidence-based research on the topic of framing human rights.