Illustration by Ben Wiseman
Human rights organizations (HROs) often build their campaigns around encouraging people to sign petitions or to write letters to public officials. But what’s the best way to motivate people to take action of that kind?
“Many [HROs] base their decisions about how to organize a particular campaign on their perceptions about what has worked in the past,” says Michele Leiby, an assistant professor of political science at the College of Wooster. Along with Matthew Krain, a professor of political science at that institution, Leiby interviewed leaders from several prominent HROs about their method of developing campaigns. (A third researcher, Kyla Jo McEntire, conducted initial work on the project when she was an undergraduate at Wooster.) “We learned that HROs sometimes take an ‘ everything but the kitchen sink’ approach,” Leiby explains.
That approach involves using multiple “frames”—that is, multiple messaging techniques—in the same campaign document. To tease out the effects of different techniques, Leiby and her colleagues designed an experiment that would expose people to campaign messages that use just one frame.
For the experiment, the researchers created materials for a campaign by a fictitious HRO that sought to ban the use of sleep deprivation as a police interrogation method. The research team recruited participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for on-demand workers, and randomly assigned them to one of four treatment groups or to a control group. Each treatment group participant read an item that corresponded to one of three framing modes: To test an “informational” frame, some respondents read a description of sleep deprivation and how it affects people in general. To test a “personal” frame, other respondents read a report on a person who had gone without sleep for three days while he or she was in policy custody. (One group read about a male victim; another read about a female victim.) And to test a “motivational” frame, another group read a statement that included a direct appeal to support the HRO’s campaign to ban that practice.
After reading the item assigned to them, treatment group participants answered a questionnaire that asked them to rate the degree to which they believed that sleep deprivation was an appropriate police interrogation technique. The questionnaire also presented them with an opportunity to take action: Would they add their names to petitions to “the Attorney General” and the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights demanding an immediate end to this practice? Respondents in the control group simply answered the questionnaire—without reviewing any campaign material.
Participants in all four treatment groups were less likely than those in the control group to say that sleep deprivation was an acceptable interrogation technique. But “the most consistent effect” applied to participants who read the appeal that used a personal frame, Krain says. That frame, he explains, “was more likely to mobilize people to act—to add their name to the petition.” Using the two other frames helped convince participants that sleep deprivation was a human rights issue, but those frames weren’t very effective in spurring them to take action.
Richard Dicker, a lawyer who works at Human Rights Watch, says that these results aren’t surprising. But he offers a word of caution: HROs that use a personal frame must respect the wishes of any victim whose story they choose to tell. “You don’t want to exploit that individual—by saying something that they don’t want to be disclosed publicly, or mischaracterizing what they said,” Dicker says.
Leiby and Krain suggest that their findings may apply to other human rights issues, such as gay marriage. But they emphasize that the findings don’t necessarily apply to HROs that operate in non-US countries. “The real value here is that we rigorously test the efficacy of what HROs have been doing to date,” says Leiby.
Kyla Jo McEntire, Michele Leiby, and Matthew Krain, “Human Rights Organizations as Agents of Change: An Experimental Examination of Framing and Micromobilization,” American Political Science Review, 109, 2015.
Read more stories by Kristine Wong.