Applying Human Psychology to Outline Animal Rights Campaigning - - PDF document

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Applying Human Psychology to Animal Rights Campaigning

Lisa Kramer University of Toronto

Outline

Social conformity Choice architecture Cognitive dissonance Framing Loss aversion / prospect theory Representativeness heuristic

Asch’s lines

Social Conformity The Tipping Point

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A Recent Example of Social Pressure in Action

Another Recent Example of Social Pressure in Action

 Control Group: Saw no voting message from Facebook (600,000 people)  Experimental Group 1: Saw neutral “Get out the vote” ad (60 million people)  Experimental Group 2: Saw the ad below embedding information about friends who voted (600,000 people)

Creative Thinking Exercise

Consider two (caricatures of) campaign messages: Campaign 1: “Lots of people eat animal products even though doing so causes environmental damage, animal suffering, and adverse human health outcomes. This is bad. Don’t eat animal products!” Campaign 2: “The majority of your neighbours have cut back on their consumption of animal products, helping the environment, animals, and their health!”

Choice Architecture (“Nudging”)

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Definition: Nudge

• “Nudges are ways of influencing choice without limiting the

choice set or making alternatives appreciably more costly in terms of time, trouble, social sanctions, and so forth. They are called for because of flaws in individual decision‐making, and they work by making use of those flaws.”

⁻ Hausman & Welch (2010, Journal of Political Philosophy) p.

126

• “First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second,

that power can be harnessed.”

⁻ Thaler and Sunstein (2009)

Examples of Nudges Examples of Nudges (continued)

A study of the effect of placement of food in cafeteria:  A line displaying “healthier” food more prominently sold 18% more healthy food than another line. (Hanks et al., 2012)  Making serving utensil more difficult to reach for less “healthy” food reduced intake by 8‐16%. (Rozin et al., 2011)

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Cognitive Dissonance

 A situation where two beliefs contradict each other, leading to emotional turbulence

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Framing

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Loss Aversion / Prospect Theory

“Losses loom larger than gains”

‐ Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky

(1979)

Representativeness Heuristic Related Reading Thank you!