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Presenters: Cooney, Hershaft

Nick Cooney
Founder and director, The Humane League

-Psychology as a road map to social change
-Naive Psychology: our common misperceptions about what motivates others and ourselves
-Tools of Influence
-Social Norms
-Commitment
-Foot In The Door
-All-or-nothing versus incremental approach
-Narrow Options
-Tell Stories
-Don't Deny It
-Personal Psychology
-"Bottom line" mentality of approaching animal activism

Alex Hershaft, PhD
Founder, Farm Animal Rights Movement

Click here for a formatted version of Alex's outline.

Animal liberation from human oppression can be achieved only by modifying human behavior. Here are some common techniques for doing just that.

• Principles of Behavior Modification
  • Approaches: direct (coercion), intellectual (changing beliefs), emotional (affecting feelings); works because people strive to reconcile feelings, beliefs, and actions
    
  • Defining objectives and tactics: what do we want and how will we get it
    
  • Assessing the audience: knowledge, beliefs/feelings, concerns/desires, physical state
    
  • Conscious mind: filters and interprets our experiences and stores them in subconscious mind; discriminating, analytical, single thought; like CPU
    
  • Subconscious mind: stores perceptions of experiences filtered/interpreted by CM; also repeated notions; unable to discriminate between fantasy and reality, large storage; like HD 
• Direct Behavior Modification
  • Done through application of power
    
  • Types of power (positive/negative): physical (liberation/jail, relief/pain), economic (reward/bribe/fine, patronizing/boycott, productivity/strike), political (ability to influence votes and workers), social (praise/condemnation, love/withdrawal, peer pressure), religious (redemption/sanction), virtual (connections, appearance, carriage)
    
  • Initially resented, but then accepted (abolition, hate crimes, labor contracts)
    
  • Quick and effective, but requires power which we and the animals have in short supply
• Emotional Behavior Modification (Appeal to Feelings)
  • Most important and always applicable; note terms: image, intuition, gut reaction, vibes
    
  • Appeals to SM, so uses repetition and association to bypass CM; form over content
    
  • Source likable: similar (appearance, ethnicity, geography, gender, profession) and friendly (humble, humorous)
    
  • Content should appeal to audience’s desires, concerns/fears or use repetition, language, imagery
    
  • Techniques: learning to be liked, using language, humor (holds up mirror to human failings without offending, defuses tension, makes likable)
• Intellectual Behavior Modification (Appeal to Beliefs)
  • Intellectual BM appeals to conscious mind, so must pass analytical test; content over form
    
  • Source credible: appearance, podium, intro, credentials, no ax, witness
    
  • Content credible: similar (agreement, positioning, menu), logical, authoritative (jargon, references, precedent, personal experience), accurate (truthful, precise – 99.44%)
    
  • Steps: establishing similarity rules, constructing arguments, learning jargon, conducting research, getting credentials or quotes, appearing and sounding credible
    
• Positioning
  
  • Definition: placement in a framework designed to influence public perception of subject
    
  • Positioning shapes perception of AR (assertive/defensive, outsider/similar, terrorist/idealist)
    
  • Gauge audience, stress similarities, enlarge spectrum, or change menu; seize opportunities