PETA is likely the most effective animal rights organization of all time despite its disruptive and often unpopular tactics. The organization created a real movement when nothing existed in the 1970s. Doing unpopular things is often necessary to create change. There are two important explanations. The first is that unpopular activism overcomes social desirability bias (this bias suggests that most people will be inclined towards avoiding unpopular tactics precisely because they are unpopular, regardless of their effectiveness). The second and related explanation is that movements, particularly in their early stages, are mostly about mobilizing activists rather than directly winning over public opinion. The general concern over the animal rights movement’s bad reputation is exaggerated. Indeed, given the pervasive influence of social desirability bias, it is just as likely that the movement should be encouraging more unpopular tactics, rather than less…
WAYNE HSIUNG: Animal rights activists often bemoan our bad reputations. There was, for example, a viral Vox story from back in 2018 that asked, “Why do people hate vegans so much?” The piece compared the reputations of vegans to atheists and drug dealers. Many of the people most concerned about this, including the primary source of that story, co-founder of Vegan Outreach, Matt Ball, have blamed PETA and other disruptive activists for this reputational crisis. Indeed, PETA came up in a recent discussion among animal rights activists as “the least effective group of all time” for this reason…
PETA is likely the most effective animal rights organization of all time despite its disruptive and often unpopular tactics. This is partly for historical reasons. PETA created a real movement when nothing existed in the 1970s. That is no small task. Peter Singer has told me, for example, that he attributes the influence of his groundbreaking book Animal Liberation to PETA distributing it everywhere…
Doing unpopular things is often necessary to create change… There are two important explanations. The first is that unpopular activism overcomes social desirability bias. As a highly social species, we have a well-documented bias towards doing things that are socially desirable, even when those socially desirable things are untrue, ineffective, or even absurd. Applied to activism, this bias suggests that most people will be inclined towards avoiding unpopular tactics precisely because they are unpopular, regardless of their effectiveness…
The second and related explanation is that movements, particularly in their early stages, are mostly about mobilizing activists rather than directly winning over public opinion (much less changing public behavior). The renowned computational sociologist Duncan Watts once told me that it’s akin to building the kindling for a wildfire. The other parts of the ecosystem don’t really matter if you can build enough potential energy in one spot… it’s hard to find a single case of a social movement that did not rely on unpopular tactics to achieve results. I gave a talk at the national animal rights conference in 2016 on the importance of disruptive protest to this social networks theory of change…
This does not imply that public opinion is irrelevant. Public opinion that suppresses activist mobilization is particularly dangerous. This is why a reputation for being “violent” is so damaging; it makes all the activists go home. But the types of public opinion that matter are much more nuanced and narrow than is commonly accepted by animal rights activists.
In short, the general concern over the movement’s reputation is exaggerated. Indeed, given the pervasive influence of social desirability bias, it is just as likely that the movement should be encouraging more unpopular tactics, rather than less. Recent polling shows that PETA’s favorability rating (43% support, 28% opposed) is far higher than the meager 22-23% support that Civil Rights activists had in the 1960s. There is an argument that PETA is too worried about public support, given this gap, and should be doing more attention-grabbing, unpopular protests. SOURCE…
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