Biases that affect activists themselves
People who plan actions to help animals are also subject to biases. Some examples:
- G. I. Joe fallacy: thinking that just knowing a bias exists is enough to avoid it.
- Optimism and pessimism bias: expecting better or worse results than the real ones.
- Zero-sum bias: thinking that if someone gains, someone else must lose.
- False consensus effect: thinking other people think like us.
- Illusory correlation: seeing a link between things that aren't linked.
How the public takes in the message
There are also effects that show how people learn and remember:
- Picture superiority: we remember what we see in pictures better.
- Spacing effect: we learn better when content is repeated with breaks in between.
- Testing effect: we remember more when we rewrite or explain something, instead of just rereading it.
- Humor effect: messages with humor tend to be remembered more.
- Google effect: we forget things we know we can easily find online.
Individual cases or numbers?
Since we feel more empathy for one identifiable victim, one strategy is to tell the stories of specific animals. But there's a risk: base rate neglect, which makes us give more weight to specific cases than to overall numbers. So it's good to combine the two.
Positive and negative messages
We remember negative things more, and negative things affect us more. That can help grab attention, but it can also push people away if it's overdone.
In short
- Activists have biases too, like optimism and false consensus.
- Knowing how people remember things helps us communicate better.
- Individual stories and overall numbers work best together.