How to be respectful AND persuasive

What values are we talking about?

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt theorized that people have two minds: one intuitive (that generates reflexes, or “gut feelings”) and one rationale, that produces reflections, thoughts, etc.

In practice, people often make a decision about right and wrong based on their gut reactions, using the intuitive mind, and then use their rational mind to produce a rationalization for the decision.

But what determines a person’s gut response? Haidt says six “moral foundations” influence human judgments about right and wrong. He argues that each moral foundation has an evolutionary rationale, and he and his collaborators have carried out ingenious experiments to show the influence of each moral foundation in people today.

These are the six basic factors that shape human judgments about good and bad: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.

Some reflections on the importance of each in terms campaigning for sexual and gender minorities:

Care

“In evolutionary terms, care for children was essential for the survival of human groups, and this care response has become generalized so that many people care about strangers and about nature…. Politicians, corporate executives, religious leaders, advertisers, and all sorts of lobbyists and campaigners seek to direct the care response to serve their priorities. Many political struggles thus involve continual attempts to trigger the care response for desired goals and to inhibit it for undesired ones.»

Indeed most strategies to marginalize sexual and gender minorities rely on proving that these groups don’t deserve care. This is done by:

• identifying them as not being part of society (either because they are unwanted, or because they come from ‘outside’)
• labeling them as dangerous

This strategy often goes with the promotion of “care” towards members of society which are seen as in need of protection. In this case mainly children, hence the often raised argument about “protecting children from propaganda/enrolment”.

Fairness

Cross-cultural research has shown that everywhere children develop very early a sense of fairness when they are treated worst than their peers. They somewhat later develop a consciousness of fairness even when they are treated better.

This value is obviously central when appealing to people to think or act differently.

Fairness has been a real major argument in the same-sex marriage campaigns, which have insisted a lot on the fact that it was “fair” and “just” to treat people equally.

The principle of fairness is important for campaign tactics, as it implies that the public needs to have a high moral assumption of the target group. To generate this assumption is difficult with highly stigmatized groups like LGBTI people

A lot of LGBTI campaigning aims at generating this sense of fairness by elaborating on the human rights abuses suffered by people, so creating a sense of unfairness. But the big question is whether it is possible for the sense of fairness to develop outside of the care value, i.e. if people only feel unfairness if the victim is someone in the “care” sphere. If so, it seems ineffective to portray LGBTI people as victims in order to generate care. It would seem that good strategies would generate a desire to care first.

This is all the more important as victimization strategies tend not to work well when it comes to changing moral perceptions.

Actually, some research has shown that in the US (and this might not hold true in other settings), that the more people perceive victims as innocent, the lesser they value them.

Nick Cooney in his book “Changing hearts” reports on a simulated jury situation where the victim was a woman who had been raped and was said to be either a virgin, married or a divorcee, the victim was seen as more at fault if she was a virgin or a married woman (and therefore by the conventional standards of the time more innocent and pure) than if she was a divorcee (Jones and Aronson 1973)

When wondering why people denigrate victims more when the victim seems most deserving of sympathy, he points to what Melvin Lerner calls this the « just world hypothesis ». People, he argues, want to believe that they live in a world where individuals generally get what they deserve, people are reluctant to give up disbelief and are troubled by evidence that it isn’t true.

In the simulated rape trial, because the women who are virgins on married were perceived as more innocent, the idea that they could be raped was more of a threat to the « just world » belief than the idea that a divorcee could meet the same fate. Therefore, when the rape victim was a virgin on married woman, fault had to be found with her in order to keep the world seeming just.

So, interestingly, the fairness value is a double edged sword: it can trigger change when people perceive the sense of unfairness, but it can also lead to denigration of the victims when people react with a kind of “they probably brought it on them somehow” reaction. I tend to think that the difference between the two reactions is brought by the level of empathy towards the victim: if we can identify with the victim, we probably sense unfairness and want it corrected. If we don’t we probably reject the person even more.

Liberty

The value of liberty, and resistance to oppression, is a strong value and it has been a strong angle in campaigning for sexual and gender minorities. Indeed, many campaigns have used the “freedom to love” argument, and it can be argued that the whole concept of Pride marches mainly rests on the value of liberty.

The difficult thing with “liberty” is that it has a high degree of variance amongst societies and that it also fluctuates a lot within a given society. The more a society rests on economic and social cooperation, the more the value of liberty will be counter-balanced by the value of “loyalty “ (see below). Hence its variation in times of crisis, when obedience towards a leader will be placed more highly than liberty on the value scale.

So again, we have a double edged sword here: liberty carries a very strong emotional potential, but it can backfire badly if this liberty is sees as working against the common good, which is very easily achieved when the campaign focus is a group perceived as socially marginal (which our opponent will do everything they can to ensure)

So campaigning around liberty arguments should probably associate systematically the notion of “no-harm”.

Loyalty

This foundation stems from the need to form and maintain coalitions to compete with other groups for resources that can help assure continuation and success.  It drives group members to value loyalty, patriotism, sacrifice, and trustworthiness and to loathe those who betray the group. It leads people to be team players, and it is triggered by perceived threats or challenges to the group. Associated emotions are group pride (for country, sports team, ethnic group, or platoon, etc.) and hatred of traitors.

Loyalty is obviously connected to the value of care, in a reciprocal relationship: you are loyal (only) to the ones who care for you and you care (only) for the ones who are loyal to you.

But loyalty has this additional dimension of obedience and it is therefore a central value for all societal construction and it is centerpiece in many campaigns, from political elections to brand promotion. Essential to the notion of loyalty are therefore the existence of a community, and the existence of leaders.

“Loyalty” has understandably been used much more by the opponents of sexual and gender diversities in order to cement the social “in-group” but it has also been used creatively in LGBTI campaign, eg in the marriage referendum campaign in Ireland, where patriotism and loyalty to a certain image of Ireland has been hugely helpful in driving voting participation.

But the value of loyalty has a strong implication for LGBTI campaigners not so much in terms of messaging but in terms of mobilization tactic: many campaigns will feature participation to a campaign as an act of loyalty to the group.

The value of loyalty also has obvious implications in terms of leadership management and movement building and campaigns without a charismatic leadership (whether people or brands) will find it difficult to mobilize.

Authority

This foundation evolved from the need to maintain social order and create beneficial relationships through hierarchies. It drives people to be aware of and respect rank and status. This foundation is triggered by anything that is construed as an act of obedience, disobedience, respect, disrespect, submission or rebellion, with regard to authorities perceived to be legitimate. It is reflected in, for example, the elevated status given to acknowledged experts and professionals and in the deference shown to superiors. It is also triggered by acts that subvert traditions, institutions, or values that provide social stability.

The value of authority relates to obeying tradition and legitimate authority.

Again, a principle that will work much more often against sexual and gender diversities, especially when they are framed as a challenge to the authority of a system.

I would argue that the major driver of the opposition to same-sex marriage, at least in France where I have witnessed it most closely, was that it undermined the authority of the majority group.

This is in my view what drove the strategy of the opponents to same-sex marriage who constructed a big part of their campaign message about the fact that there was a risk to the authority of the majority social model.

But the entry point for LGBTI campaigners could be to reclaim the notion of respect, very closely related to the notion of authority, for example by

This notion of respect can be used to reposition the notion of authority and its repository, i.e. to “divert” the authority of the people to somewhere else, beyond their control. This has be widely used by placing the authority within the medical profession (eg by flagging high the 1990 WHO decision to take homosexuality out of the list of mental disorders).

This shifting of the authority can also be used for religious targets, as the notion of authority of the individual is highly controlled, as all authority derives from a higher order. These approaches are very well illustrated (involuntarily?) with Pope Francis’ now famous “who am I to judge?”

The notion of authority is also very important in contexts where legal or judicial changes were secured in socially hostile settings, and where social transformation campaigns could base part of their messaging on the authority of the State, the Congress or the courts.

Sanctity

This moral value is the lesser known

Haidt postulates that cultures invest certain objects and ideas with irrational and extreme values.  Some objects and ideas are regarded as sacred while others are intuitively repulsed as disgusting and abhorrent. According to Haidt, the evolutionary origin of the Sanctity/Degradation foundation was the need for an instinctive mechanism that would lead early humans away from parasites and pathogens — in other words, away from rotting food, human waste, decaying corpses, etc.

Haidt argues that religion and the concomitant creation of sacred symbols served to bind individuals into large cooperative societies. The notion of sanctity is therefore closely linked to authority (it takes a source of authority to define what is sacred) and to loyalty (obedience to the sacred is the expression of the loyalty towards the group)

Sanctity is important for LGBTI campaigners, as it lies at the heart of the stigma that has been built against us. A lot of our opponents’ strategy is to generate and maintain a feeling of dislike or disgust. So we are constantly confronting the notion of sanctity.

I would argue here that our best chance here is not to fight the value of sanctity but to influence what it contains until we are included in what the society considers “sacred” (e.g. inherently good)

There are two important lessons from Jonathan Haidt’s research on intuitive moral psychology. The first is that most people are primarily driven by automatic reactions, what Haidt calls the elephant; these reactions are then justified by the rational mind, the rider that usually goes along with the elephant’s preferences. The implication is that activists need to recognize intuitive responses and build campaigns taking them into account.

When planning actions and campaigns, it is worth paying attention to the six moral foundations — care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity — that are the criteria people use to make judgments about right and wrong. However, the application of these foundations is constantly being shaped by “moral entrepreneurs,” including governments, advertisers, media and religious leaders, who seek to mobilize human feelings for their own advantage.

Three of these foundations — care, fairness and liberty — are a natural fit for nonviolent activists, and deserve attention to ensure they are used to maximum effect. Three other foundations — loyalty, authority, and sanctity — are more likely to be obstacles when activists challenge repressive systems. The challenge is to know how to counter the manipulation of these responses to serve oppression and whether it is worth developing alternatives.