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On Solid Ground: Evaluating the Effects of Foundational Arguments on Human Rights Attitudes

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Abstract

What makes some human rights campaigns for the physical integrity rights of prisoners more effective than others? Despite various normative arguments condemning these practices, only limited systematic analysis documents the relative effectiveness of different arguments on individuals. This is surprising, because the success of human rights campaigns depends on getting individuals to care about and support policy positions that protect human rights. We constructed an experiment to compare the effects of six different arguments against prisoner abuse and torture. We found that an argument which emphasized the suffering of the prisoner had a consistently positive and significant effect on opposition to torture and prisoner abuse. However, this effect was largely contingent on subjects’ political ideology. Political conservatives actually became less opposed to torture, on average, after reading the same argument emphasizing the prisoners’ suffering or the sacredness of human beings.

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Notes

  1. “Framing effects” happen “when (often small) changes in the presentation of an issue or an event produce (sometimes large) changes of opinions” (Chong and Druckman 2007, 104)

  2. Alternatively, others argue that foundational arguments should be set aside (Ignatieff 2001).

  3. Some suggest that different foundations can be useful for some individuals but not others. For example, Hollinger (2001) argues that religious individuals can and should rely on religious foundations and that secular people can and should rely on secular human rights foundations.

  4. Other human rights experimental designs utilize control groups that do not receive any experimental stimulus (McEntire et al. 2015).

  5. Recent intelligence shows that torture is an ineffective method of interrogation to uncover accurate intelligence (Costanzo and Gerrity 2009). Nonetheless, many Americans still believe that torture is justified and does result in credible and important information (Pew Research Center 2014).

  6. The full experimental treatments are on file with the authors.

  7. We thank one anonymous reviewer for mentioning the possible disconnection between a policy leader and a concept such as sacredness. We contend that it is common for political leaders and policy experts in the USA (and elsewhere) to invoke religious language when making arguments to the public. Relatedly, religious elites from religious organizations (who can also be policy experts) publicly disseminate messages that may have political implications. Examples include the US Constitution drawing from both Protestant ethics and enlightenment philosophy that liberation theology greatly influenced human rights causes in South Africa, and the Second Vatican Council’s contributions to the fall of communism (Ibrahim 2015).

  8. Restricted models without these controls are substantively consistent with the models presented in Table 2.

  9. Predicted probabilities for all models were calculated by holding dichotomous variables (ideology, gender) at their modes and holding ordered categorical variables (age, religiosity) at their median values.

  10. Predicted values for each experimental group were estimated from Appendix Table 4, Model 2A.

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Acknowledgments

Both authors contributed equally to this project. The authors are grateful for helpful feedback received at a University of Maryland Comparative Politics Workshop (2015), the International Studies Association Annual Convention (2015), and The Social Practice of Human Rights Conference (2015). The authors thank the Political Theory Subfield at the University of Maryland for a research grant to carry out the experiment. Experiment approved under University of Maryland IRB no. 560302-7.

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  1. Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), University of Maryland, 2117 Chincoteague Hall, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Stephen Arves

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska, 511 Oldfather Hall, Lincoln, NE, 68588, USA

    Joseph Braun

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Correspondence to Stephen Arves.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 Feeling thermometer squared
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Table 4 Interaction of treatments with ideology on scale variable
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Arves, S., Braun, J. On Solid Ground: Evaluating the Effects of Foundational Arguments on Human Rights Attitudes. Hum Rights Rev 20, 181–204 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-019-0545-7

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