Thursday, May 15, 2025

Achieve societal change



ABSTRACT:

 

This article examines the sociological literature on the social construction of problems, with a particular emphasis on the mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of certain issues as public problems within society. Based on insights from sociologists in the field, it is evident that it is not the objective importance of an issue that transforms it into a public problem; rather, multiple dynamics that come into play in the societal debate, including mediatization. By synthesizing the relevant sociological literature, this article identifies key factors that contribute to the construction of public problems and underscores the potential for social movements to leverage these dynamics to achieve their goals as fast as possible.

 

Introduction

A moral agent conscious of a big injustice happening in a society has a moral obligation to act effectively to eliminate this injustice as quickly as possible. To be able to fulfil this duty of acting effectively, the moral agent must learn the sociological mechanisms that allow the elimination of an injustice in a society. In other words, the moral obligation to eliminate an injustice includes a procedural obligation to learn the mechanisms that allow the societal elimination of injustices.

It is the sociology of the social construction of public problems or the sociology of social problems that studies the process by which certain issues are identified as public problems and become the object of political action. According to sociologists, problems that become identified by society and the authorities as public problems become so not because of their objective importance, but because of some dynamics that take place in the societal debate (Becker, 1966)[1].

 

I.    Three dynamics by which a problem metamorphoses into a public problem

 

a.    Collective mobilization

The first dynamic of the process transforming an issue into a public problem is collective mobilization, also called “popular participation” by some sociologists (Cobb, 1983)[2]. In this stage, some people who consider that an issue is a problem, start to publicly make a political claim stating that the problem has to be eliminated by the State or by a company that is blamed for the problem. Very logically, to see one day the elimination of a problem, some must beforehand claim publicly and clearly that this problem has to be eliminated. Lawyers have to put precise claims in their legal actions if they want the judge to give them what they request for their client, in the same way social actors must make a precise claim to get what they want (Felstiner, 1980, p. 636)[3]. This claim-making can be made in link with demonstrations, violent actions, peaceful symbolic actions, petitions, letters to the editor, boycotts, strikes, etc. Mobilization aims to make the claim more visible to the public, attract attention and sympathy from the public opinion or the media, to defend publicly the claim by disseminating the arguments in favor of the claim in the public and finally to increase the number of citizens who share the political opinion of the claim to be able to make sufficient pressure to see a change (Hassenteufel, 2010, p. 51)[4].

 

b.   Mediatization

The second dynamic is mediatization. Nowadays, without media coverage it is unlikely that an important issue will ever become a public problem and will be resolved by the authorities (Dispensa, 2003, p.90)[5]. This is easily understood by the fact that a claim and the arguments in favor of it are much more visible to the public if they receive media coverage. Since mediatization can quickly increase the number of citizens sharing the political opinion favorable to the claim, it is extremely important in the process of social change. Therefore, moral agents seeking to eliminate an injustice should carefully study the factors that help to increase media coverage surrounding an issue.

 

c.    Politicization

The last dynamic is politicization. It refers to the stage where some authority or political person puts finally the issue on the political agenda with the objective of producing a decision that will eliminate the problem (Hassenteufel, 2010, p. 53)[6]. According to Kingdon (1984), a problem must first be on the governmental agenda to be put on the political agenda and produce a political decision for its elimination. What Kingdon (1984) calls the “governmental agenda” is what integrates all the subjects to which people in and around government are paying serious attention (Kingdon, 1984, p. 143)[7]. These objects are often the ones that are regularly covered by the media.

In a more graphic way, Kingdon (1984) explains that to generate a political decision three streams are at play.

The first stream is the problem stream. An issue must be picked from the available problem stream where swim all the problems to which the government pays attention. Three main mechanisms capture the attention of public authorities so that it appears in the “problem stream”:

-        indicators (i.e. polls or statistical measures which are often mediatized),

-        policy milestones (i.e. crisis which are often covered by the media),

-        feedback effects (i.e. information, in the context of an evaluation in particular, about policy failures which are also mediatized).

The second stream is the policy stream. It corresponds to the available policy solutions that can be easily adopted. These solutions must meet the criteria of technical feasibility, their compatibility with prevailing values and their capacity to anticipate future constraints.

Finally, the political stream, which integrates the public opinion of the moment, the actual organized political forces (political parties in particular), the executive branch (sometimes its recent change) and the possibilities of political collective bargaining, gives sometimes rise to a political opportunity for an authority or a politician to take action. Only the joining of these three streams can generate a political decision centered on the elimination of the problem (Kingdon, 1984, p. 178).

 

 

II.      How social movements can influence these dynamics to increase their chances of success

a.  Collective mobilization

i.            Expressing the claim

As stated above, the collective mobilization dynamic is the one where social actors make publicly a political claim. We have seen that a problem has very little chance to be eliminated if nobody claims for its elimination. Applied to the problem of killing animals for simple food habits, this means that to see one day this practice eliminated there must first be people who express the political claim that this practice has to be forbidden.

 

ii.         Choosing the strategical arguments for the claim

During collective mobilization, not only a claim is made but are also disseminated in the public the arguments supporting it. To be efficient in attracting the sympathy of as many citizens as possible as well as of the media, social movements have to choose carefully the arguments they use to defend the claim. Chateauraynaud (2011)[8] explains that to be effective, the arguments must be directly related to commonly shared principles in the society. Commonly shared principles play the role of a cognitive filter: only those claims that enter in this filter can be easily accepted by the public.  Citizens must be able to link the claim to a general known principle, so that the demand sounds like the continuation of something already existent. A good argument for a claim is the one that produces the insertion of the other's point of view into a known structure. In other words, to be understood by the public as easily as possible and to create as many citizens as possible sharing the political opinion favorable to the claim, an argument has to take its origin in commonly shared moral principles. If we apply these principles, the claim “killing animals for simple food habits has to be banned”, could be defended by an argument like the following: Our society's principles of nonviolence and protection of the weak demand that we end the barbaric practices of slaughterhouses, where countless innocent animals are killed daily despite viable, humane plant-based alternatives. By aligning our social practices with our principles, we can transform slaughterhouses from symbols of injustice into relics of a less enlightened past. That is why the act of killing animals for simple food habits must be penalized.”

 

iii.      Choosing the mode of the collective mobilization

To be effective, social movements have to choose the mode of collective mobilization that has the biggest chances to make the authorities to accept their claims. It is therefore a moral obligation for them to know what researchers say on this subject.

In a study, after analyzing hundreds of violent and non-violent resistance campaigns, Chenoweth (2011) showed that non-violent campaigns succeed in 53% of cases while campaigns that use violence succeed in only 26% of cases, for campaigns that use terrorism the success rate is only 9%[9]. The researchers working on this issue, instead of determining what is objectively violence or terrorism, base their analysis only on what is perceived as “violent” or “terrorist”.

From a logical perspective, we can therefore consider that campaigns are more successful when they rely on a peaceful mode of mobilization. Cases where the more disruptive mode of mobilization is successful can be explained by the fact that the movement's demands enjoyed broad support.

Abrahms (2006) states that no matter what are the real policy demands of the movements using terrorism, their mode of action generates the belief that their objectives are maximalist and dissuades the authorities to make any concessions[10].

Regarding the perception of the first Palestinian intifada, Kaufman (1991)[11] found that while only 15% of the demonstrations during the Intifada were violent (the majority of the latter consisted only of throwing rocks on Israeli Defense forces of the territories), 80% of Israelis perceived that the means used by the protests were “mainly violent” and 93% believed that the Intifada was “directed both towards civilians than towards the army”. More interestingly, while the first objective of the Intifada was “to communicate to Israelis the need to end the occupation of the territories”, Kaufman (1991) found that 66% of Israelis thought that the intifada was directed “against the existence of the state of Israel”.

This is just one example highlighting the results found by Chenoweth (2011) and showing that the more a movement is perceived to be violent the more it creates the impression that the movement has extremist goals that shouldn’t be adopted by society.

In another study (Feinberg, 2020)[12] where were compared the consequences of different kinds of actions  on the perception of two different groups regarding the same cause and coming from the same movement, it is shown that movement actions that are perceived as "extreme" or "immoral" by the public generate less public support for the movement. In this study, Feinberg (2020), explains this by saying that when a movement uses “extreme protest actions”, this creates a perception of the immorality of the protest actions which generates decreased emotional connection and identification with the actors of the movement, which in turn creates less movement support. What is interesting is that one of the cases tested on subjects was an animal rights protest. Approximately 300 participants were recruited to test the case. They were separated in three different groups. Each of the groups learned that they would read a transcript from a news broadcast and answer questions about it afterward:


“participants read about a fictional animal rights activist organization called Free the Vulnerable (FTV). The extremity of the movement’s protest behavior was manipulated at three levels: Moderate Protest, Extreme Protest, or Highly Extreme Protest conditions. The protesters in the two extreme protest conditions engaged in unlawful activities (e.g., breaking into an animal testing facility) modeled after protest activities of real-life social movement activists, with the protesters in the Highly Extreme Protest condition engaging in particularly disruptive and harmful behaviors (e.g., drugging a security guard [as well as freeing animals kept in the lab and destroying property]) compared to the protesters in the Extreme Protest condition (e.g., sneaking past the security guard [and freeing animals from the lab without destroying any property]). By contrast, in the Moderate Protest condition the activists marched peacefully expressing their demands. Including two extreme protest conditions allowed us to explore competing possibilities regarding the extreme protests’ effects on observers’ support for a movement. On the one hand, observers may base their level of support directly on how extreme the protest actions are, and therefore protest extremity would have a linear impact on bystanders’ support. On the other hand, there might be a threshold of extremity beyond which bystanders’ impressions do not get more negative.” (Feinberg, 2020, p. 1101).
[13]

After reading what they thought was a transcript from a news broadcast, participants indicated how extreme they thought the protest was, how much they socially identified with members of the movement, how much they supported the protesters, how willing they were to join the movement and how much they supported the movements’ overarching cause.

The results showed first that participants in both the Extreme Protest and the Highly Extreme Protest conditions viewed the protesters’ behavior as more extreme than did participants in the Moderate Protest condition. Additionally, participants in the Highly Extreme Protest condition viewed the protesters’ behavior as being more extreme than participants in the Extreme Protest condition. Participants in the Moderate Protest condition, supported the protesters more, were more likely to join the movement, and were more supportive of the movements overarching cause. But despite the fact that participants in the Highly Extreme Protest condition viewed the protesters’ behavior as being more extreme than participants in the Extreme Protest condition, researchers found non-significant differences between the other answers of the Extreme and Highly Extreme Protest conditions. In accordance with the threshold hypothesis, the researchers concluded:

“Thus, while protesters in the Extreme Protest condition were viewed as significantly less extreme than those in the Highly Extreme Protest condition, they were judged in a similar light. This result is in line with research arguing that the perceived inappropriateness of many acts does not occur linearly, but as a step function, where behaviors that cross a given threshold are categorized in a similarly negative manner (Alexander, 2008).” (Feinberg, 2020, p. 1101).

Since the conditions of Extreme Protect Action were only in the illegal entry in the building and the illegal saving of the animals without any vandalizing or damage to property and that the answers of the participants in this condition weren’t much better than in the condition of Highly Extreme Protect Action where the drugging of a security guard and damage to property were involved, it means that the simple fact that animal activists do something illegal (without causing any direct damage to someone’s physical integrity or property) can be sufficient to produce the same negative results as if the activists did drug a human being and damaged private property. According to the results of this study, we may think that the Animal Liberation Front’s opposition to all forms of bodily integrity violations (but its acceptance of damage to property, which is already worse than the Extreme Protest Action Condition in the Feinberg study) may not mean any reduction in the negative consequences of their actions in the eyes of the public. Moreover, despite their ethical principles, animal activists engaging in destructive direct action are still labeled as terrorists (PosĹ‚uszna, 2020, p. 3)[14].

As one of the aims of collective mobilization is to persuade the biggest number possible of citizens to adopt the political opinions favorable to their claims, social movements have to choose strategically their mode of collective mobilization.

As Chenoweth's study demonstrated, campaigns perceived by the public as violent are half as likely to succeed as those perceived as nonviolent, while those perceived as involving terrorism are six times less likely to succeed.

All other things being equal, it is therefore preferable to opt for a peaceful mode of mobilization. The possible exception is the inability of a movement to obtain media coverage for its demands and arguments when using a peaceful mode of mobilization. In this case, more disruptive actions are strategically justified to obtain media coverage and make the demands and arguments in favor of them known to citizens. If a mode of mobilization perceived as violent is chosen, it will be necessary to prioritize a demand that has broad public support to increase the mobilization's chances of success. Such issues, for the animal rights movement, could include the problem of abandoned pets, the consumption of animal products, or animal testing. Around 35% of citizens are often opposed to slaughterhouses and animal testing. When media coverage is impossible through other means, it can be advantageous for the movement to adopt a disruptive action that puts forward commonly accepted principles and arguments that can be used to advance other demands, thereby changing public opinion about them and creating a new cultural norm favorable to the movement.


The perception of whether actions are extreme or not is produced by the media's framing; there is therefore room for activists to influence this.

 

b.        Mediatization

We have seen above that an issue has very little chances to be put on the political agenda if it doesn’t receive media coverage. The mediatization is therefore a very important dynamic helping to transform a problem into a public problem. We will examine precisely this topic, especially regarding the concept of framing, before explaining what social movements can do to increase their chances of success regarding this important dynamic.

It is been a long time that researchers working on the media say similar things about the media:

They are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals in the mass should think about, know about, have feelings about. (Lang, 1966, p. 468)[15]

Mccombs (1972, p. 184) suggested also an agenda-setting function of the mass media[16]. This function manifests notably through the selection of issues considered as worthy of interest by the media and through the framing of these issues.

 

i.      Choosing angles of newsworthiness

Research on news values, newsworthiness and gatekeeping done by journalists is useful to understand some of the factors that the media uses to decide whether a subject is newsworthy or not.

Sociologists have made lists of criteria stating that to receive media coverage an issue must satisfy at least with one or more of them. One list of Harcup & O’Neill (2017) includes the following:

“Exclusivity: Stories generated by, or available first to, the news organization as a result of interviews, letters, investigations, surveys, polls, and so on.

Bad news: Stories with particularly negative overtones such as death, injury, defeat and loss (of a job, for example).

Conflict: Stories concerning conflict such as controversies, arguments, splits, strikes, fights, insurrections and warfare.

Surprise: Stories that have an element of surprise, contrast and/or the unusual about them.

Audio-visuals: Stories that have arresting photographs, video, audio and/or which can be illustrated with infographics.

Shareability: Stories that are thought likely to generate sharing and comments via Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media.

Entertainment: Soft stories concerning sex, showbusiness, sport, lighter human interest, animals, or offering opportunities for humorous treatment, witty headlines or lists.

Drama: Stories concerning an unfolding drama such as escapes, accidents, searches, sieges, rescues, battles or court cases.

Follow-up: Stories about subjects already in the news.

The power elite: Stories concerning powerful individuals, organizations, institutions or corporations.

Relevance: Stories about groups or nations perceived to be influential with, or culturally or historically familiar to, the audience.

Magnitude: Stories perceived as sufficiently significant in the large numbers of people involved or in potential impact, or involving a degree of extreme behavior or extreme occurrence.

Celebrity: Stories concerning people who are already famous.

Good news: Stories with particularly positive overtones such as recoveries, breakthroughs, cures, wins and celebrations.

News organization’s agenda: Stories that set or fit the news organization’s own agenda, whether ideological, commercial or as part of a specific campaign.” (Harcup & O’Neill, 2017)[17]

According to this, if social actors want to increase the news coverage of an issue, social movements can present it through one or more of these angles to journalists.

 

ii.     Creating contacts with the gatekeepers

Regarding gatekeeping, Clayman (1992) says the following:

“Gatekeeping, as a social scientific concept, can be traced to Lewin's (1947) writings on social planning. He observed that the most efficient way to bring about widespread social change is to concentrate on persons in key positions of influence, who function as "gatekeepers" in the flow of goods and ideas through the society.”[18]

Therefore, another excellent way to increase media coverage is to create contacts with some journalists who detain the power of deciding if an issue will become news. It is possible for example for the representatives of an NGO to ask to meet once a journalist around a cup of coffee to talk about their work and future events that can interest the newspaper “in order to see if it would be possible in the future to provide their newspaper with exclusive information regarding the planned activities”. During the meeting it is possible to ask the journalists about advices regarding what are the criteria that help a subject / event related to their cause to be seen as newsworthy. The simple fact of meeting this journalist will create a personal contact that may help to get more media coverage in the future.

 

iii.        Moving from stigmatization to celebration

A study showed that vegans were a decade ago often stigmatized by the media coverage in the United Kingdom (Cole & Morgan, 2011)[19]. Similar results were obtained regarding media coverage of vegan in Australia (Masterman-Smith, Ragusa, & Crampton, 2014).[20] However, in the recent years vegans’ image in the British press has been transformed from a stigmatised lifestyle to a normalized and healthy diet in particular through the mediatization of vegan celebrities (Lundahl, 2020).[21] This is surely good news and gives the idea that something similar can be done regarding the image of “animal activists”. The animal rights movement could invite celebrities advocating for the animals to animal rights events to do for example discourses or to be the first signatories of petitions that can be mediatized. Such an association with celebrities in the media has the potential to transform the libel of “animal activist” into something much more positive.

 

iv.        Avoiding negative framings and creating positive ones

Regarding the framing done by the media, Entman (1993, p. 52) says the following:

To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation.[22]

Because of the framing process, if a demonstration is presented by the media as a confrontation between police and demonstrators, the article may talk only about the confrontational aspect and “the protesters’ critique may not be part of the story – not because there wasn’t room for it, but because it was not defined as relevant” (Reese, 2001, p. 8).[23] That is why activists should avoid as possible they can the negative framing of “radical activists” or “extremists” for example by avoiding to do illegal actions during a demonstration, explaining to the participants of a demonstration that if illegal actions are committed during the action the media will frame them negatively. Activists can also point out in their press releases sent before the demonstration to the media that the organized demonstration will be peaceful. The press releases sent just after the action can state that it was a great event which helped a lot of citizens realize better the claims and arguments of the movement and represents therefore a democratic success.

 

v.          Taking into account the depth of frames

Frames not only shape the presentation of an individual story but can have lasting consequences on our ways to perceive some issues:

more “cultural” frames don’t stop with organizing one story, but invite us to marshal a cultural understanding and keep on doing so beyond the immediate information. These are the “strategic” frames that speak to a broader way to account for social reality (Reese, 2001, p. 12).[24]

Some sociologists distinguish frames according to their “depth”: deep frames are more general and often older and shallow frames are specific and often more recent (Wolfsfeld, G., 1997).[25] The frame “Cold War” is for example deeper than “unprovoked attack” (Reese, 2001, p. 12) and the frame “animal rights extremism” is deeper than “sabotage of a slaughterhouse”. Some elements of an issue can remind the public of an old and deep frame and produce in their mind the insertion of the issue in this old frame. We can make the hypothesis that the threshold in the study of Feinberg (2020) seen above related to extreme protest actions, after the crossing of which, the consequences of some modes of collective mobilization are similarly negative is linked to the frame “animal rights extremism” that was sustained by the media and that is now known and used by many citizens to categorize animal rights actions as soon as they involve illegality.

 

vi.            Avoiding absolutely two negative frames

If social movements want to be effective, they must avoid the possibility for the media and the public to insert their actions in a frame that has negative consequences for their cause.

To avoid the frame of “animal rights extremism”, this may imply the necessity of highlighting in a press release that the organized action was / will be totally peaceful and was / will be organized by a serious NGO some of the interesting works of which can be presented in the end of the press release. Ensuring that the visual aspects of an event (important element for media coverage) like banners and signs help to avoid a negative framing can also be useful.

Another framing is also usually used by the media regarding people who oppose the violence inflicted upon animals. When there is media coverage about veganism or vegans, it is generally framed it as a “lifestyle” issue. Because of this framing, the issue of the elimination of the killing animals for simple food habits is therefore constructed not as a question of justice that needs to be addressed by the society and the authorities, but as a simple question of personal choice. This makes the political aspect of the problem totally invisible and ensures that any media appearance of vegans is absolutely innocuous for the problem that animal activists want to eliminate. Given that even activists are influenced by the media, it is not always easy even for them to think outside the usual media frames portraying animal people either as militant extremists or as inoffensive vegans just sharing recipes. To avoid the frame “animal rights extremism” that has negative consequences as well as the frame “lifestyle” that has also very bad consequences since it transforms an important question of justice into a benign question of personal choice, animal activists have not only to make sure that they are seen as peaceful but also have to make their political claim visible for example when they talk to the journalist or with visual aspects like for example inscriptions on clothing like “our society has to respect the lives of the animals”. To make it impossible for the media to ignore the political claims of an event, it is possible to put the claim or part of it directly in the name of the event like “kindness to end speciesism festival” or “march for the closure of slaughterhouses”. Also, highlighting in a press release that a demonstration isn’t composed of vegans but of all people who have the political claim that our society should one day respect the lives of all animals, and explaining in it that the event isn’t about the consumption practice of consumers but about the political opinions of citizens may help to make the political claim of the movement become more visible in the media. Indeed, it is easier for people to share the political opinion of someone to whom they can identify, and it is easier for nonvegans to share the political opinion of end of killing animals for simple food habits if they can identify with other nonvegans who have this political opinion.

 

vii.    Implementing absolutely two positive frames

Media often frames animal agriculture as an economic and social issue, rather than as a major ethical and environmental issue. Animal activists have to act to change that by expressing clearly that it is a major ethical issue and highlighting in their communications that we have to take into account the fact that the quasi unanimity of moral philosophers, our society’s specialists of ethics, who have worked on our relation to other animals consider that the practice of killing animals for simple food habits is wrong and should be eliminated (to highlight this fact, animal activists can use in their communications the “Montreal declaration on animal exploitation” signed by around 550 academics)[26].

Animal activists also have to express that animal agriculture is a major environmental issue by informing that according to scientific studies, like the one from Eisen & Brown (2022), the gradual cessation of animal agriculture, over a period of 15 years from today, would lead to the neutralization of global warming over the period 2030-2060, which means in other words, that it would totally offset the warming effect of all other human greenhouse gas emissions over this period[27]. The social actors can be successful in changing the framing surrounding animal agriculture, since there are nowadays more newspaper articles that are critical towards meat consumption (Mroz, 2022)[28].

 

c.        Politicization

Choosing strategical arguments for a claim so that the public opinion is more likely to support it and paying attention to the framing of the problem so that the subject is mediatized favorably in newspapers, are not ends in themselves but help the problem to be put on the governmental agenda (which is the agenda that integrates the problems to which the media pays attention).

What helps the issue to be put on the governmental agenda is also the concrete availability of solutions to eliminate the problem. To be effective a claim should be already expressing what kind of solutions have to be put in place. And ideally focusing on the solution that is the easiest to be put in place by the politicians regarding public pressure and political forces. For example if animal activists want the end of the killing of animals be concretized in law, they should claim not for a legal right to live for the animals but for the creation of a criminal offense that makes it subjected to a fine to kill animals for simple food habits. Since at the end, all problems are eliminated in the law, activists have to request the help of lawyers who are sympathetic to their cause to know how to frame their claim so that it focuses on the easiest legal change to be made to see their problem eliminated. It should be also a good idea to ask parliamentarians sympathetic to their cause which is be the best moment to bring up their issue in the parliament with a petition or another political initiative. If they want to ask parliamentarians to defend their cause in the parliament, they should check which are the actual political forces after an election and ask to politicians who are the more likely to gather the support of the majority. After a new election, it can be a good idea to make their issue heard in the parliament, so that the new elected politicians see that their cause is discussed in the parliament. Activists have to know that a political or legal decision that refuses to eliminate their problem can be an opportunity to mediatize the issue again and to make circulate in the society the arguments in favor of their claim and sometimes showing that the institution didn’t act in a required way to address their problem correctly. This new mediatization of the issue, made easier by the existence of a new institutional decision to which the media generally pays attention, will help to increase the support to their cause in the public opinion which is very good to change the cultural norm in favor of their cause and which will help us in the future initiatives. All social movements had to make the same requests several times to have their problems eliminated. After each discussion, their arguments are more shared and better understood which already changes the culture and creates more citizens in favor of their political claim.

 

Conclusion

Some may argue that the strategy proposed is reformist, to which Gramsci would answer that nowadays you can't achieve the total transformation of society by force and that the cultural fight is an essential part of the revolution. I would answer that this cultural fight can consist also in making the claim for the adoption of laws and institutional facilities that create an anarcho-communist society based on love. The informations contained in this article are very important but the different operations at play in the process of societal change are not to be interpreted as a "strict procedure" to be followed necessarily to achieve change.  The only rule is love.  So it will be easy. Have a good time at playing. It is sexier. And know that your children will live in a magnificent world. Learn about doshas to know what to do to be in a good emotional health and teach others to do the same. Have a good life.


Anoushavan Sarukhanyan

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To cite this article: Anoushavan Sarukhanyan (2025), Achieve societal change. A sociology analysis, Strategical communication. Lausanne. 2025.

 


 

 

 



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[20] Masterman-Smith, H., Ragusa, A.T. and Crampton, A., 2014, November. Reproducing speciesism: A content analysis of Australian media representations of veganism. In Proceedings of the Australian Sociological Association Conference.

[21] Lundahl O. (2020). Dynamics of positive deviance in destigmatisation: celebrities and the media in the rise of veganism. Consumption Markets & Culture, 23:3, 241-271.

[22] Entman, R. (1993). Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58, p. 52.

[23] Reese S. D., Gandy O. H. Jr. & Grant A. E. (2001). Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, p. 8.

[24] Reese S. D., Gandy O. H. Jr. & Grant A. E. (2001). Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, p. 12.

[25] Wolfsfeld, G., (1997). Media and political conflict: news from the middle East. New York: Cambridge University Press.

[26] Montreal declaration on animal exploitation, see: https://greea.ca/en/nouvelles/montreal-declaration-on-animal-exploitation/

[27] Eisen M. B. , Brown P. O. (2022). Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilise greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century. PLOS Clim 1(2).

[28]  Mroz G. & Painter J. (2022). What do Consumers Read About Meat? An Analysis of Media Representations of the Meat-environment Relationship Found in Popular Online News Sites in the UK., Environmental Communication.

______________

PDF of this paper: How to change society. A sociology of the social construction of problems analysis. Strategical communication. Lausanne. 2025.PDF

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Solomon Asch experiment - A study on conformity

Social Pressure and Perception

Imagine yourself in the following situation: You sign up for a psychology experiment, and on a specified date you and seven others whom you think are also subjects arrive and are seated at a table in a small room. You don't know it at the time, but the others are actually associates of the experimenter, and their behavior has been carefully scripted. You're the only real subject.


The experimenter arrives and tells you that the study in which you are about to participate concerns people's visual judgments. She places two cards before you. The card on the left contains one vertical line. The card on the right displays three lines of varying length.



The experimenter asks all of you, one at a time, to choose which of the three lines on the right card matches the length of the line on the left card. The task is repeated several times with different cards. On some occasions the other "subjects" unanimously choose the wrong line. It is clear to you that they are wrong, but they have all given the same answer.


What would you do? Would you go along with the majority opinion, or would you "stick to your guns" and trust your own eyes?


In 1951 social psychologist Solomon Asch devised this experiment to examine the extent to which pressure from other people could affect one's perceptions. In total, about one third of the subjects who were placed in this situation went along with the clearly erroneous majority.


Asch showed bars like those in the Figure to college students in groups of 8 to 10. He told them he was studying visual perception and that their task was to decide which of the bars on the right was the same length as the one on the left. As you can see, the task is simple, and the correct answer is obvious. Asch asked the students to give their answers aloud. He repeated the procedure with 18 sets of bars. Only one student in each group was a real subject. All the others were confederates who had been instructed to give incorrect answers on 12 of the 18 trials. Asch arranged for the real subject to be the next-to-the-last person in each group to announce his answer so that he would hear most of the confederates incorrect responses before giving his own. Would he go along with the crowd?


To Asch's surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed to the majority at least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the 12 trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members, the mean subject conformed on 4 of the 12 trials. Asch was disturbed by these results: "The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct."


Why did the subjects conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar." A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct.


Asch conducted a revised version of his experiment to find out whether the subjects truly did not believe their incorrect answers. When they were permitted to write down their answers after hearing the answers of others, their level of conformity declined to about one third what it had been in the original experiment.


Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to be liked by the group and because they believe the group is better informed than they are. Suppose you go to a fancy dinner party and notice to your dismay that there are four forks beside your plate. When the first course arrives, you are not sure which fork to use. If you are like most people, you look around and use the fork everyone else is using. You do this because you want to be accepted by the group and because you assume the others know more about table etiquette than you do.


Conformity, group size, and cohesiveness



Asch found that one of the situational factors that influence conformity is the size of the opposing majority. In a series of studies he varied the number of confederates who gave incorrect answers from 1 to 15. He found that the subjects conformed to a group of 3 or 4 as readily as they did to a larger group. However, the subjects conformed much less if they had an "ally" In some of his experiments, Asch instructed one of the confederates to give correct answers. In the presence of this nonconformist, the real subjects conformed only one fourth as much as they did in the original experiment. The dissenter's answers made the subject more certain that the majority was wrong. And the real subject now experienced social pressure from the dissenter as well as from the majority. Many of the real subjects later reported that they wanted to be like their nonconformist partner (the similarity principle again). Apparently, it is difficult to be a minority of one but not so difficult to be part of a minority of two.


Some of the subjects indicated afterward that they assumed the rest of the people were correct and that their own perceptions were wrong. Others knew they were correct but didn't want to be different from the rest of the group. Some even insisted they saw the line lengths as the majority claimed to see them.


Asch concluded that it is difficult to maintain that you see something when no one else does. The group pressure implied by the expressed opinion of other people can lead to modification and distortion effectively making you see almost anything.


Implications for us and the oppressed animals

The more there will be people who will claim that our society has to stop killing animals for food, the easier it will be for others to agree with this claim, because they will see that there is not unanimity in the society on this issue. If this claim is never expressed it will be very difficult for people to agree with the opinion that we have to stop killing animals for food. Creating a public debate on this issue by making the claim that slaughterhouses have to be banned will create a situation where there will be more discussion on the subject and more people will be aware of our claim and because of the Asch effect the practice will be seen less and less normal. The conversion to veganism strategy without the creation of a public debate will have a very little effect. Every time when we make a flyer, when we are interviewed, when we debate etc. we have to clearly state that we demand the end of the killing.
killing.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Great comic by Insolente veggie

Here is an excellent comic realized by Insolente Veggie concerning the strategy issue in the animal rights movement.







The same cartoon is avalable in Spanish: http://insolente0veggie.over-blog.com/pages/Abolicion_de_la_carne_abolicion_del_veganismo-8694653.html

And also in French: http://insolente0veggie.over-blog.com/article-pour-l-abolition-de-l-esclavage-pour-l-abolition-du-veganisme-118279044.html

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Freedom to flourish for all animals


About the necessary paradigm shift needed in the animal rights movement.

I. Introduction


a. Nonhuman animals are slaves

Ever since Darwin we have clearly known that human beings are not the only animals to have interests and to feel emotions. Nevertheless, nonhuman individuals are legally a property in our speciesist society. Considered as a ressource, they are exploited for their milk and eggs ; are killed for their skin and flesh ; are used as a “biological material” for experiments, etc. The definition of slavery is the following: “the condition of being legally owned by someone else”. Therefore, nonhuman animals are slaves.

b. 99.8% of animal slavery = food

The number of terrestrial animals killed for food is numbered at roughly 60 billion individuals every year. Aquatic animals are counted in tons, about 150 million tons every year, which makes at least 1000 billion victims. Overall that makes about 1'060 billion individuals killed every year for food. In comparison, the fur industry kills 60 million individuals (→ 0,0057% of food victims) and animal experimentation about 300 million victims (→ 0.028% of food victims).


II. What strategies must be used to abolish animal exploitation?


First, we will analyse the strategy used by social movements to bring about change and secondly we shall compare this to the strategy used by many animal rights activists until now.

a. Strategy used by social movements


aa. Claim-making machines


Social movements are claim-making machines.

1) They express a claim: → “Abolition of apartheid!”, “We demand women’s right to vote!”, “The war must be stopped!”
2) Then, they make the claim more visible in the society (demonstrations, petitions, letters, TV debates, etc...)
3) This claim-making creates a debate in society, causing the issue to be put on the agenda and hence to become a public problem.

It is important to notice that it is always a minority who starts making a claim. And during the societal debate (that can last for decades) the more the claim is discussed, the bigger the minority becomes, even eventually becoming a majority.

Once the unanimity concerning a situation/practice is broken because some people begin to make claims for a change, it becomes easier for others to question the practice → the psychological study of Asch.

bb. Psychological study of Professor Asch


"Which of the bars on the right is the same length as the one on the left?" It depends...


In this experiment, Professor Asch showed ten people a line drawn on a paper. These participants were asked to say which of the bars next to it was the same length. In reality, however, only one of the participants was the real subject of the study, as the other nine were this psychologyst's accomplices and were instructed to give an incorrect answer. When the nine accomplices gave a wrong answer, the subject often complied with the majority. But when there was at least one person who broke unanimity by giving the correct answer, it became easier for the subject to question what the majority said and he was more likely to respond correctly. The presence of just one person breaking the unanimity could reduce conformity as much as 80% (see: Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(9), 1–70. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093718 ).

After the experiment, the subjects 
who complied with the majority said generally that they had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar". And some of them even thought that the majority was right.

If the social pressure generated by unanimity is so strong for those questions for which the solution can be found just by looking, we can easily imagine that it is even greater for justice issues that require some ethical thinking.

Once a claim demanding the abolition of a practice is heard in society, the unanimity about the legitimacy of that practice is broken. It begins to be perceived as problematic, making it easier for others to refuse to comply with the majority and to also support the abolition of the practice.

Therefore, one can understand that by expressing and making visible the claims that create a debate in the society, social movements take full advantage of the beneficial effect caused by the act of breaking the unanimity about certain situation.

b. Strategy used by animal rights activists: conversion strategy


We have seen that animal exploitation for food represents about 99.8% of the exploitation. Nevertheless, concerning this issue animal rights activists have used the conversion strategy.

Conversion strategy consists of converting people to vegetarianism/veganism without creating a societal debate nor making any claims (like for example: “Slaughterhouses must be closed now!”).

The belief behind the conversion strategy is this:we are just a minority, so we have to first convert a lot of people to veganism and only then will we create a public debate.“

1) But all social movements were a small minority when they started to make claims, even the movement for the abolition of human slavery.

2) And the conversion to veganism is much more complicated if there is no debate in society concerning this issue, because it is extremely difficult to question a unanimously accepted practice (Asch study).

Social movements have never used this kind of tactics alone. If boycott is used, it is used with claim-making. Examples: Martin Luther King called for a boycott of Montgomery buses and claimed that racial discrimination had to be abolished. Gandhi called for a boycott of British textiles and claimed that India had to be independent. Moreover, what is also problematic is that veganism isn't even perceived by the public as a political boycott, but as a personal choice (see later).

The conversion strategy is not used in social movements but in religious movements.

But the success of this tactic is very limited: After 2,000 years of this strategy being used by Christianity, the majority of humans are still not Christian, and Christianity has even used plenty of very violent conversion tactics. How many thousands of years will we have to wait to abolish animal exploitation if we use this strategy?




III. Consequences of the conversion strategy



a. Inefficiency


aa. Historical look


Throughout, history no change for more justice was obtained with the conversion strategy. However, the strategy of social movements has been shown to succeed many times (human slavery abolitionist movement, civil rights movement, women's liberation movement, LGBT movements etc.). So we can see, that it is very strange for the animal rights movement to use a strategy that has never brought about any change for more justice instead of using the one that already been proven to work many times.


bb. Proportion dominance


Studies have found that courses of action that completely (or almost completely) eradicate some problem are preferred over courses of action that provide incomplete eradication. For example, in a study published in 2006, Professor Bartels found that an intervention saving 102 lives out of 115 at risk was judged more valuable than one saving 105 lives out of 700 at risk, even if the number of lives saved was higher in the second intervention! This psychological effect is called “proportion dominance” and Bartels showed that its impact was even more important in the context of saving natural resources or animal lives. An intervention preventing 245 of 350 fish deaths due to pollution from Factory A was judged much more important than one preventing 251 of 980 fish deaths due to pollution from Factory B (see: Bartels, Daniel M., Proportion Dominance: The Generality and Variability of Favoring Relative Savings Over Absolute Savings (2006). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 100, pp. 76-95, 2006).

Let's imagine that being vegan saves the lives of 100 animals each year. Since the total number of animals killed every year is at least 1'060 billion, the saving of those 100 animals is considered as totally insignificant by our human mind because of this “proportion dominance” effect. This is the reason why many people refuse to change their diet, knowing as they do that their tiny individual actions will not even slightly change the enormous number of animals killed for humans each year.

However, if the act of refusing to eat animal products was presented as part of a global boycott from an international movement seeking to eliminate the entire 1'060 billion killings every year, we can assume that people would think much more seriously about the issue. All this without even taking into account that just the expression of the claim “Killing animals for food has to be abolished!” will create a debate in society, will help to spread our arguments in society and therefore make a substantial amount of people think about the problem.


cc. Misuse of time and energy

The animal rights movement doesn't have an astronomic number of activists and our resources aren't infinite. Nevertheless, we are using our time and energy to convert 6 billion non-vegans one by one, all without even knowing if our strategy will succeed one day. Instead we could be creating a debate among our society as a whole on the legitimacy of killing animals for food, therefore making every citizen think about the issue. Because our goal is to change the situation for the animals, we should spend our time using the most effective strategy that allows us to achieve the abolition of animal exploitation as quickly as possible, otherwise billions of animals will suffer and die for nothing.

So, if we want our ideas to be heard more clearly by society, hence encouraging more people to boycott animal products and ultimately causing animal exploitation to be abolished; we need to generate a societal debate, and this latter will be created by claims and not by the strategy of conversion.


b. Question of personal choice

The advocacy of veganism creates the impression amongst the public that it is a question of personal choice and not a question of justice.  “Just like some people are Muslim, some people are vegan, everyone has the right to do what s/he wants.”

Of course the decision of killing and eating another individual isn't a question of personal choice but a question of justice towards the exploited animals. However, people will not realise this if there are no people who claim that the killing of animals for food has to be abolished.

Because of the use of the “veganism” concept, this is what remains to the public mind: “They don't eat animal products because they are vegan”  which is very similar to “This guy doesn't eat pork because he is Muslim”. It comes down to personal choice again. If we use political claims it will change to: “they boycott animal products because they demand the closure of slaughterhouses / they want animal exploitation to be abolished / they want to ban killing animals for food.”

Defining ourselves as vegans/vegetarians transforms the refusal of a practice into a simple lifestyle. If we don't want this issue to be perceived as a question of personal choice, when someone asks us why we don't eat animal products, instead of saying “I am vegan” we should say: “I boycott animal products because I am for the closure of slaughterhouses” or “because I am for the abolition of animal exploitation”.


c. Psychological reinforcement of speciesism


The goal of the conversion strategy is to convert people to veganism; the means are not important, which is why many arguments are used that have nothing to do with the oppression of nonhuman animals. Example: health or environmental arguments are nearly always on the flyers that activists distribute. And sometimes there is not a word about speciesism.

If we were in a society where some people ate children, would we criticise the practice by saying that this can be bad for the health of the cannibals? No, we would criticise it only by saying that children have an interest in living their lives. Also talking about the health of cannibals sends the unconscious message that the interests of the children are not so important.

Imagine there was a demonstration against the genocide in Rwanda in which people would have said: This has to be stopped because there is too much blood produced by the killings and this pollutes the groundwater.” It is immoral to use this kind of argument (health or environment) when humans are killed. And it is also immoral to use this kind of argument when sentient beings from another species are killed.

The conversion strategy drives us to use every argument that we have in order to convert people to veganism, but when we use the health and environmental arguments instead of takling about the victims killed every day, we implicitly send the unconscious speciesist message that the lives of nonhuman animals are not so important.




IV. What to do to abolish the exploitation of nonhuman animals?


a. Example of human slavery abolition


Let's take the example of human slavery abolitionists in the 19th century.
Did they try to convert people to « hooganism » (a way of living that excludes all products of human slavery)?


No! They made claims that human slavery has to be abolished and created a debate in the society on the question. Animal rights activists should do the same.

By the way, the famous american abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, even openly ridiculed the tactic of boycotting all products of slavery, saying it was at best a distraction from the larger abolitionist work and at worst it whitewashed the conscience of the people to the detriment of slaves who did not profit from it. (see: Hinks, Peter and McKivigan, John, editors. Williams, R. Owen, assistant editor. Encyclopedia of antislavery and abolition, Greenwood Press, 2007, p. 268)

b. Morally unacceptable strategy


If there were concentration camps in our country in which human slaves produced all kind of products, would we just tell people to stop buying these products or would we claim that these concentration camps have to be closed down? I think we would clearly express that they have to be closed down and it would be totally immoral from our part just to ask people to boycott these products.

Thus, not only is the strategy of conversion inefficient, creates the impression that killing animals is a matter of personal choice and unconsciously reinforces speciesism, but moreover is not a morally acceptable position.


c. Social movement strategy

If we want to abolish animal exploitation, we must express a claim asking for its abolition and make it resound more and more in the society, creating a societal debate on this issue.

For example when we write flyers, press releases, when we are interviewed, when we organise demonstrations, instead of the individualist sentence: go vegan!” we must make clear claims for a change in society:Killing animals for simple food habits must be abolished.”

To illustrate and fully understand the difference between the two strategies, compare the following examples.


Conversion strategy,:

Go vegan!”

Veganism is good for the planet.”

Veganism is good for your health.”

Vegans have better sex.”

Going vegan is a rational choice.”

Vegan food is great!”



Social movement strategy:



 Slaughterhouses must be closed now.” (copied from the official website of international marches to close down all slaughterhouses: https://stopabattoirs.org/)
 
Killing animals for simple food habits should be forbidden.” 

"We demand the abolition of the property status of animals"

"We ask for the abolition of fishing and fish farming" (copied from the official website of the World Day for the End of Fishing: https://www.end-of-fishing.org/en/why/ ) 
 
Animals should have a legal right to life.”

Farming, fishing and hunting, as well as selling and eating animal products, must be abolished.” (copied from meat abolition movement website:  http://meat-abolition.org/en/wwam )

Society should condemn and fight speciesism just as it fights racism and sexism.” (copied from the official website of the World Day for the End of Speciesism: https://www.end-of-speciesism.org/en/our-demands/ )




Conclusion

When we take part in activism or just speak in defense of non-humans, we need to be sure that our message is understood as a request for change that concerns the whole society. Instead of being afraid of the public, we must have the courage to speak for the animals involved and begin to express what we really want:

We demand the abolition of animal slavery!”

Edit: since this article was first published (november 2010), many thousands of animal rights activists and organizations are now using this social movement strategy to highlight the injustice of the practice of killing animals for food habits.

Anoushavan Sarukhanyan