A Rose by Any Other Name?
What Psychology Research Can Tell Us about Messaging
By Nick Cooney, author of Change of Heart
As a longtime leafleter, one of the questions that I have
to answer before going out to spread the message of compassion is, which booklet
should I use? Sure they’re all pretty much the same on the inside, but the
titles and the front covers are very different.
If my purpose in leafleting was to express my own beliefs
as accurately as possible, I’d hand out a "vegan"-branded booklet
every time. After all, I do want everyone to go vegan. But expressing my own
beliefs isn’t the reason I go leafleting. I leaflet because I want to change
other people’s behaviors so as to help animals. So the question of which
booklet to use is now a very different one: “Which booklet will create the most
behavior change, thereby sparing the greatest number of farmed animals a
lifetime of suffering?”
Each of us probably has our own gut instinct about which
booklet is most effective. Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on our gut
instincts when choosing which booklet to use. Decades of psychology research
into what does (and does not) motivate people to change their behavior can give
us some scientific insight. To illustrate what I mean, let me tell you about a
homeless man named Harold.
Psychology researcher Laura Shaw and her colleagues set
up a study in which student participants were told about the Friend In Need
program, a university program pairing students with homeless people. Student
participants were told about Harold Mitchell, a Friend In Need client who
became homeless three years ago after losing his job due to illness. Some
students were told that a large request would be made of them: that they
volunteer six hours of their time to work directly with Harold. Other students
were told they would be asked to volunteer just one hour of their time stuffing
envelopes. A third group of students was not told that any request would be
made of them. All of the students were then instructed to choose which message
about Harold they would rather hear: a calm, information-only message about
Harold’s needs, or an emotional appeal that detailed what Harold was going
through and the suffering it had caused him.
The students who expected that only a small request would
be made of them (one hour stuffing envelopes), and those who did not expect any
request would be made of them, did not care which appeal they heard. It did not
matter to them whether they were moved by Harold’s story, because they didn’t
have much to lose. On the other hand, students who were told they would be
asked to spend a long time volunteering with Harold did not want to hear the
emotional appeal. They did not want to hear detailed accounts of what Harold
was going through and the suffering that his homelessness caused him. Why?
Because if they heard the details of Harold’s life they would probably feel
sympathy for him, and might end up agreeing to volunteer six hours to help him.
Better for them to just turn off their emotional switches and not be moved by
Harold’s plight – after all, who wants to give up six hours of their life?
(Shaw, Batson and Todd 1994).
The phenomenon researchers were examining is called
empathy avoidance and it boils down to this: when we think that having sympathy
for someone might inconvenience us, we try to avoid feeling sympathy. We
leafleters experience this firsthand all the time. Who among us hasn’t handed a
booklet to a passerby, only to hear them exclaim seconds later: “I don’t want
to look at this! It’s going to make me stop eating meat!” And into the trash
can the booklet goes.
So, you may be wondering, just what does empathy avoidance
have to do with booklets? People who receive an explicitly "vegan" or
"vegetarian" booklet know as soon as they receive it that a very
large request is going to be made of them: that they change their diet
dramatically. They’d have to find new foods to eat, new restaurants to go to,
new grocery stores to shop at, and so forth. Because they know a large request
is being made of them, they will not want to read the emotional appeal on the
inside of the pamphlet. The saddening stories of pigs, chickens, and cows
subjected to intense cruelties in factory farms would stir up their sympathy,
and could cause them to – gasp – give up meat. As a result of empathy
avoidance, people who get a booklet with one of these titles should be more
likely to throw it away without opening it to read through the message inside.
On the other hand, people who receive a booklet without the
word "vegan" in the title or on the back page either don’t know what
is being asked of them yet, or don’t think that a particularly large request is
being made. They’ll be more likely to read through the contents of the pamphlet
because they don’t feel like they have much to lose by doing so. It’s only
after reading through pages of photos and information about the cruelties of
factory farming that they then come to the message encouraging them to change
their diet. By that point the booklet has already stirred up their empathy for
farmed animals, hopefully enough so that they can’t say no to our request that
they change their diet.
Studies on empathy avoidance aren’t the only ones that
suggest that booklets without the word "vegan" or
"vegetarian" should be significantly more effective at changing
people’s diets. For example, communication researchers have found that when
people learn someone is about to try to convince them of something important,
they become less likely to be persuaded (Freedman and Sears 1965; Allyn and
Festinger 1961). Why is this the case? Researchers theorize that knowing a
particular message is coming gives people the opportunity to drum up
counter-arguments in their heads, and to look for biases the speaker may have.
Whatever the reason, the takeaway is that booklets with more vague titles are
likely to be more persuasive. People who receive one aren’t immediately sure of
what they’re being encouraged to do, so they don’t have the ability to
automatically start discrediting the message.
Whew! Who knew leafleting could be so complicated? Yet if
we want to create as much behavior change as possible, in order to reduce as
much suffering as possible, we need to think carefully about the message we
use. Do we just want to express our own beliefs, or do we want to use the
message that is most likely to persuade others? Even if non-V-word booklets are
just 10% more effective (and my guess is they are dramatically more effective),
switching to them in your own outreach will mean a life or death difference for
thousands if not tens of thousands of farm animals.
Thanks for reading, and happy leafleting!
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