Rehumanization: Putting the ‘human’ in human rights
An empathy-based narrative strategy for preventing atrocities
Ahead of Human Rights Day, I want to share a concept called rehumanization that I have been developing with human rights neuroscientist Laura Ligouri from Mindbridge.
We want to ask what a hope-based version of human rights work would look like, that draws on the understanding drawn from neurobiology of how human group formation works. We want to offer a new tool that sits alongside current practices like investigations and protests.
This is a challenging conversation and these are ideas that need to be tested, but as someone who belongs to a group that has been the subject of dehumanizing narratives for thousands of years — with disastrous consequences — I believe this work is too important for us to shy away from challenging ourselves to do whatever we can to do all we can.
How to counter dehumanization with rehumanization
Exposing toxic rhetoric repeats it, re-triggering the subconscious division embedded in the language.
So what can we do instead?
We offer the brain a different image, a different story to think of when thinking of that group, and our relation to them.
Rejecting the narrative that multiculturalism has failed, the India Love Project provides a constant stream of real-life stories of relationships between different groups of people.
This is a wonderful example of how activists on social media can create an alternative narrative to the narrative of ethnic tension that we risk reinforcing when we only document abuses. Narratives are built through a mosaic of stories: dehumanizers build a mosaic with stories of crime and violence. Those promoting humanity must tell different stories.
We must learn to use social media to spread love as effectively as those who spread hate
Authoritarian populists have a large, disciplined, and sophisticated infrastructure for promoting their narratives in public discourse. They use psychographic micro-targeting to market hate digitally, chatbots to spread hateful false narratives and disinformation and actively create tension between communities, and WhatsApp and Facebook groups to spread fake news and stoke division. Imagine these tools in the hands of the Gestapo or the Interahamwe.
It’s important to document and expose these trends. But we also urgently need to learn to use social media to promote pro-social, pro-human rights behaviour. We need to be able to counter online incitement to hatred with online understanding, curiosity, and acceptance of difference. We need to promote stories of positive social contact between groups, simulating the empathy we want the target audience to feel.
Social media, with its micro-targeting and massive ad buys, can be used to turn people against each other or an out-group. It can also amplify rehumanizing stories that show positive social contact. We can show audiences content that grows tolerance, nurtures shared identities, and stimulates friendly behaviour toward other people.
We have to figure out the words, images, and stories that make people feel empathy and compassion for other humans — and how to spread them as virally as those that spread hate? It will be harder than spreading fear-based stories of inhumanity. But this is the hard work we have to do.
Narratives of humanity vs narratives of inhumanity — what you fight you feed
Until now, civil society has focused on monitoring, exposing, and condemning hate speech online and calling for regulation. But what if the sunlight of media attention, instead of disinfecting with shame, makes things grow?
Narratives grow when we repeat stories and ideas. The more we talk about the online behaviour we want to stop, the more we feed it.
Calling out abuses without showing what we want instead can reinforce the narrative of division; the idea that the two groups are inherently divided and can never get along. Reminding each side of their grievance, and reinforcing those group identities that divide. This stimulates exactly the kind of behaviour we want to prevent, as humans are social animals who learn behaviour and ways of thinking from other people in their groups.
What can human rights groups do if raising awareness and “name and shame” risks adding fuel to the fire? How do we act without amplifying the thing we oppose?
We have to build something else instead. We need narratives of humanity that heal, that change attitudes and behaviour for the better.
What human rights work focused on cultivating humanity would like
Several insights from neuroscience and psychology offer ways to tell rehumanizing stories. None of these are simple and without risks, they have to be used carefully, with agency and respect for the people in the story. But we have to understand the role of biology - of hormones, brain chemicals, of DNA - in human behaviour if we want to improve it.
You can see a full list of tactics here.
Here is how we do it. Listen — Test — Pitch.
1. Listen — Find out what generates empathy
In a Rehumanization campaign, we would use focus groups to identify what kinds of stories can bring groups together. Or what makes a dominant in-group respect the rights of a marginalised out-group. What content - what precise words and images - will most effectively instil understanding, empathy/compassion, solidarity, and connection that can withstand divisive “us vs them” rhetoric and build support and trust between communities that others seek to divide.
This phase would also involve workshops to train a local group of narrative leaders from all involved groups and communities to articulate the new narratives they want to promote in society to replace the divisive, dehumanizing ones.
Rather than exposing stereotypes, we would seek to replace them with new, deeper, and more detailed pictures they can use to think about the other group (and also how they think about their own identity).
Mindbridge has developed the Countering Extremism Directive to find interventions adapting approaches like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to deradicalize groups like the Proud Boys. We believe similar approaches can be used on less extreme “bystander” groups to shift them towards being “upstanders”. For example, it can remind them that they believe in being kind and open-minded, challenge a stereotype they might have about a different group, make them get involved in a peace group, join a campaign, or speak out against racism.
2. Test — Find out how to spread rehumanizing stories
Once we know what stories can create empathy, we find how to tell them in a way that is engaging and resonates so that people will watch and share. For example, we use a/b testing to refine different versions of these stories to make them more effective and salient.
Depending on what works in our tests, we might show the audience people like them having positive social contact with the “other”. Like stories of welcoming communities where hosts and newcomers come together around a dinner table as equals.
If seeing people from our in-group connect to another group is making us more likely to respect their human rights, then is this Coca-Cola ad human rights work?
We might show one group people like them helping the other. Like the Jewish-Israelis who became aware of help provided by their in-group to Palestinians, who then saw Palestinians as more human.
We might show one group the other group changing their minds. Colombians who developed more empathy for former FARC fights in Colombia after seeing videos of them express willingness to reintegrate into society.
We might show one group people like them changing their mind. Like the parents who become more open to LGBT people when they see other parents learning to be more accepting and tolerant.
Above all, we would tell stories of encounters across difference, where that difference is respected and honoured.
3 Pitch — Make stories of humanity salient
While the process in steps one and two should be ongoing, they should also begin to inform our activism strategy.
Once we know what kind of stories can bring communities together and also can capture attention and imagination (say, dinners where communities come together and see eye-to-eye), we can create more of those moments with our activism.
Our PR strategies will be about getting eyeballs on stories that simulate empathy and humanity: we create novel and suprising moments to get journalists writing about them, and involve influencers who will post about them. Our social media strategy will elevate and amplify those kinds of stories.
We can also work with cultural creators to produce beautiful, inspiring art; we can create new platforms to spread simple social media content; and we can encourage solutions journalism to tell those kinds of stories.
These stories do not always need to involve the affected groups, they can also reinforce our shared humanity, like this ad, which we challenge you to watch this one without crying.
We would seek to create this kind of engaging content that trains our empathy muscle and activates our identity of being part of a bigger human family. We would activate new identities in people, that offer a new way of seeing instead of the dominant, divisive identity (e.g. sports, food, business, even through our DNA).
What this means for human rights
This is a version of social change communication focused on showing people the way we hope they will behave in the changed society we hope to achieve.
This is human rights focused on the “human” part, to achieve the “rights” part.
Rehumanization as a storytelling strategy should not even start with the in/out group frame at all, but rather focus on a shared humanity frame or any other uniting frame.
You can read a longer, more detailed version of this article here. Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more. Laura and Mindbridge are breaking new ground by bridging the fields of activism and neuroscience. Check out Laura’s Ted Talk and writing.
Hopey, changey stuff
A leading organization for this kind of work is the Horizons Project. Read about their work in their newsletter. and their NEAD project.
Hope-based expert Fotis Filippou sent me this podcast ‘Disillusioned’ by an Israeli activist, it’s 1-1 conversations with Israeli anti-occupation activists about their personal journey of seeing through and unlearning what they’ve been taught - ticks so many hope-based points. Themes that keep coming up: people changing their mind, encounter, love, compassion and responsibility, a vision of a better future for all people between the river and the sea.
Appeal for shared humanity, and nuance, from the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, in which he frames the conflict as humanity vs horror, not group vs group: “Il faut puiser dans notre humanité et saisir nos appartenances dans leur complexité pour éviter toute pensée réductrice.”
I don't have a hope-based angle on this, but the place a rehumanization strategy is most needed right now is Xinjiang, where the Chinese government’s genocide of the Uighur people continues unabated. Please give this issue some attention and think of groups like Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Xinjiang Victims Database as well as the International Service for Human Rights in your holiday donations.
Quote of the week
“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign.
But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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