Study Finds More Info Could Lead to Less Support for Intervention; Slate Depressed

The authors of a recent paper
focusing on the success of the
viral campaign “Kony 2012” say their findings “suggest that
when a complex adverse situation is reduced to the actions of a
clear enemy, this inspires moral outrage against the enemy.
However, if the complexity of the situation becomes clearer, the
enemy inspires less moral outrage and determination to act.” Moral
outrage, then, can fuel the determination to act, interventionism,
and both moral outrage and the desire for interventionism seem
harder to stir up when more information is available.

This ought to be a good example of why more information, and
rational thinking, are so important in creating a prudent,
non-interventionist, foreign policy. Unless, of course, you
consider relieving moral outrage to be America’s burden.
Slate social-media headlined an article on the study
 as “The Depressing Reason Why Hashtag Campaigns Like
#StopKony And #BringBackOutGirls Take Off.” Slate‘s Joshua
Keating wrote that the paper “suggests—depressingly—that the
oversimplification of the message in the original video was exactly
the reason it was successful,”
continuing:

Defenders of campaigns like these often say that they
can be gateways toward greater understanding of complex global
issues. Viewers first get hooked on the moral outrage, then learn
more about the underlying conditions that produced the crisis,
becoming better-informed global citizens.

This paper suggests that unfortunately the opposite is true.
Viewers get interested when they hear about evil monsters like the
LRA or Boko Haram that just need to be stopped. When they learn
more about the issue and find out that, lo and behold, the world is
a very complicated place, that killing the monster won’t be so
easy and that there are larger issues in play beyond the
monster itself, they lose interest. 

I don’t see how it’s unfortunate that “better-informed global
citizens” are still coming to understand “the world is a very
complicated place.” If they choose not to be interested in
intervention, they remove from pro-interventionists a bank of
emotionalism and force them instead to argue their often naïve and
basic foreign policy ideas within the context of a “complicated”
world.