Focus group report 2: knowledge, reactions, moral actions. Easytoread v.1

Mediated Humanitarian Knowledge;

Audiences’ reactions and moral actions

PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE, REACTIONS AND MORAL ACTIONS IN RESPONSE TO HUMANITARIAN ISSUES

Summary Findings of Focus Groups Conducted in the UK in 2011 – Interim Report 2

Bruna Seu, Dept. of Psychosocial Studies, BIRKBECK, University of London, UK.


Acknowledgements
This report presents findings from the three-year research project entitled: Mediated Humanitarian Knowledge; Audiences’ Responses and Moral Actions (‘KARMA’), launched in 2010 by Dr Bruna Seu and colleagues, Dr ShaniOrgad and Professor Stan Cohen (LSE). This project was kindly funded by the Leverhulme Trust: reference grant number F/07 112/Y.
We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all the non-profit agencies and participants who took part in this study, without whose generous cooperation and time the research would have been impossible.
We are also very grateful to the researchers – Dr. Frances Flanagan, Dr. MastourehFathi, Dr. Rachel Cohen, Dr. Rodolfo Leyva - who have assisted with data collection and project management. .
More information can be found on the project website:

This report may be cited as:
Seu, I.B. (2014) Public knowledge, reactions and moral actions in response to humanitarian issues.
Contact details:
Bruna Seu, Dept. of Psychosocial Studies, BIRKBECK, University of London, 30 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5DT.
Email:
Copyright © KARMA Project: Mediated Humanitarian Knowledge; Audiences’ Responses and Moral Actions
Disclaimer
The views discussed in this report do not necessarily represent the views of the author, but are the expression, as objective as possible, of the public’s opinions and observations communicated during the focus group discussions. This notwithstanding, any analysis involves a certain amount of interpretation and particularly with qualitative data, is never totally objective.
While every effort has been made by the author to ensure that the contents of this report are factually correct, neither the Leverhulme Trust nor the author accept responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this Interim Report, and shall not be liable for any loss or damage that may be caused directly or indirectly through the use of, or reliance on, the contents of this report.

Table of Contents

Summary Statement-Introduction:4

Executive Summary: 5

Key Messages:5

Main Findings:5

  1. Knowledge:7
  2. Moral Principles 7
  3. Why Help?9
  4. Other Focused Motives10
  5. Hierarchies of Care10
  6. Socio-Cultural Context11
  7. Reactions:13
  8. Emotional Reactions13
  9. Other-Concerned13
  10. Agency-Centred Reactions13
  11. Self-Centred Reactions14
  12. Cognitive Reactions: The Problem of Suffering and its Solutions14
  13. The Nature of the Problem15
  14. Natural Vs. Man-Made Humanitarian Issues16
  15. The Causes of the Problem17
  16. The Nature of the Solution18
  1. Actions:20
  2. Monetary Donations 21

3.1.2 Child Sponsorship21

3.1.3 Direct Debits22

3.2. Other Forms of Monetary Donations23

3.2.1. Material Contributions24

3.2.2. Time24

3.2.3. Fundraising Events and Signing Petitions25

3.3. Blocks to Acting25

3.3.1. Moral boundaries – Whom We Should Help25

3.3.2. Why We Shouldn’t Help Distant Sufferers28

3.3. Structural Reasons31

Appendix A:KARMA’s Research Aims, Methodology and Ethics32

Appendix B:Table of Participant Demographics36

Appendix C: Interview Schedule for Focus Group Participants43

Summary Statement-Introduction

Building on the findings presented in the first report (see Appendix A for the KARMA study’s full scope of research questions and project information), this second report specifically addresses the components of the KARMA study concerned with exploring:

  • The moral responses and reactions evoked in audiences by humanitarian appeals, and how these correspond to their ideological, emotional and biographical underpinnings. (Please note that audience’s biographical underpinnings will be more fully examined in Report 3)
  • How the responses evoked by humanitarian appeals relate to audiences’ routine thinking, emotions and actions that constitute their ‘everyday morality.

In what follows, the key messages and findings related to the above will be summarised and then unpacked in more detail and empirically substantiated with excerpts from the focus group interviews with participants. Correspondingly, while most of the themes identified in this report were prompted by the researchers’ questions (see Appendix C for the semi-structured interview schedule) others emerged spontaneously during group discussions. However, rather than a truth finding operation, this report presents an attempt to map out the landscape of meanings and understandings that members of the UK public employ to make sense of, empathise with and respond to humanitarian issues. To this end, this report is therefore parsimoniously partitioned according to the following three key components identified in the research questions:

  1. Knowledge: This section explores participants’ knowledge and criteria for when, why and whom to help in times of need.
  2. Reactions:This section explores participants’ emotional and cognitive reactions to NGO campaigns and broader humanitarian causes.
  3. Actions: This section explores participants’ most and least preferred types of helping and chartable practices, and their underlying rationales.

Executive Summary

Key Messages:

  • The study provided clear evidence of marked and widespread public fatigue in response to humanitarian communications. At the same time, participants to the study responded sympathetically and empathetically to distant sufferers. This suggests that the fatigue might be primarily due to a crisis in the relationship between the public and NGOs rather than between the public and distant sufferers.
  • Despite a widespread emotional responsiveness to distant suffering, several blocks to action were identified, thus suggesting that mobilising public empathy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for action. The 3 most important blocks to action were:

a)Participants’ perceived duties and obligations towards distant sufferers, including moral principles prioritising blood ties or local communities

b)Distrust in NGOs, their use of resources and effectiveness of their interventions in the light of public socio-cultural understandings of humanitarian issues and their causes.

c)Participants’ lived experience and their varying capacities for managing distressing knowledge[1]

  • The study shows that although physical and social distance can be an obstacle to public capacity to fully relate to distant sufferers, it is the ‘human’ and emotional distance from them that the public resists. Monetary transactions are perceived to increase the human distance between the public and the sufferers.

Main Findings:

The KARMA research found that the British public is overall generous, actively engaged in caring for others in their community, and sympathetic to the plight of distant sufferers. However, blocks that prevent this capacity for care from turning to action to alleviate distant suffering were also identified.

  • All participants reported having strong emotional reactions to information regarding humanitarian and development issues and overwhelmingly responded with empathy. Overall people accepted and expected to feel saddened and shocked by the knowledge of distant suffering, but some found the communications excessively traumatic and counterproductive. However, as well as expressing concern for the suffering Other, the overwhelming majority of participants voiced strong negative emotions towards NGOs for their perceived manipulative intentions.
  • The vast majority of participants to the study had been involved in or had contributed to humanitarian or charitable causes at some point in their lives. However, the study shows that the public perceive and respond markedly differently to humanitarian emergencies caused by natural disasters and man-made humanitarian crises. Similar differences were also identified in public attitudes and responses to discrete emergencies and on-going development problems.
  • Although most participants have donated to NGOs to help distant sufferers, the study shows an increasing cynicism towards and distrust of NGOs and their actions towards both sufferers and the British public. These manifested through a strong resistance towards a long term commitment and support of particular NGOs and a strong dislike of direct debits, in favour of one-off donations or, when possible, direct action that would bypass NGOs.

SECTION 1: KNOWLEDGE

This section looks at public’s knowledge, understood in this context as the information, beliefs and attitudes informing and contextualising their responses (both reactions and actions) to humanitarian information, as well as their criteria for when, how and whom to help.

1.1. Moral principles:

  • Pure altruism, that is helping simply to make someone else feel better expecting nothing in return, was an important and frequently mentioned principle underpinning people’s helping behaviour. Some considered helping others an intrinsic and innate part of being human. Most believed that the British people are very generous, more so than other countries:

Doug:[…] I just think that probably we are just a caring nation.

  • The vast majority of participants highly valued being part of a community involved in a ‘give and take’. For these participants the desire to help was based on gratitude and reciprocal support in the community, with some participants applying this criterion beyond their immediate community
  • In terms of abstract moral principles guiding their helping others, participants rarely differentiated between helping a distant sufferer and somebody nearby or emotionally close to them. Throughout, participants expressed a wish for an experience of helping involving embodied, face to face contact or based on shared humanity.
  • However, in practice, this lack of differentiation did not necessarily translate into a Universalist application of such principles. Although the data unquestionably demonstrated the integration of the normative to help others into participants’ individual and national identity, participants’ willingness and experienced duty to help others stopped at a variety of points of distance between the helping self and the needy other.
  • There was a shared belief across all the group that helping is intrinsically and implicitly good. Conversely, selfishness and not helping when one can, was considered negative and frowned upon by society and some considered helping others an intrinsic and innate part of being human.
  • Some of the principles for helping had a broad ‘everyday’ quality and multipurpose application (e.g.: ‘every little helps’ ) while other principles were based on participants’ lived experience, particularly gratitude for help received (e.g. children or relatives’ treatment in hospital). Overall, in these cases, the giving back pertained to local institutions and community and gratitude was expressed through reciprocal help and support in the community.
  • Wanting to give something back often extended beyond gratitude for specific help received and stemmed instead from a more general appreciation of having been fortunate in life and having been cared for by society.
  • For others, the wish to ‘give something back’, seemed to stem from an appreciation of the disparity in global life conditions and an expectation to somehow redress the disparity.

Adrian:It’s like when it’s in the news and very much at the forefront of everyone’s minds, it’s almost expected of you to do something about it, us as, you know, prosperous, healthy fortunate people living in the world. It would be impertinent of us not to do anything about it.

  • However, it was felt by some that this sense of care for others was not equally applied to the British themselves. This was particularly felt because of recession and the current economic crisis

CathyNo, no, yes, we are the British and I think on a lot of things we get left behind in this... you know, the way the country is at the moment the British come last in a lot of things.

  • Participants also made use of absolute notions of moral obligations when explaining why they helped, also in the case of distant suffering.

Jerry: The rich should help out the poor

Latifa:Yes, I was going to say, you feel like it's the right thing to do, don't you?

  • Among the broader motivations for altruistic practices, the following were mentioned most often: Christian caring, social responsibility, conscience and empathy

Imogen: I don't know whether it’s duty, though… You make your choices in life, but it’s not a… it may be a question of duty for some people, but I don't feel it’s duty. It’s my choice.[…] That’s not the way I think (that we are all children of God) […] I just feel I’ve got a social responsibility. I don't feel duty. […] It comes from a sense of the world around you and empathy.

Bonnie:And it’s a question of conscience, you know, if you don't make that little effort to give where you're inspired to give, then it’s your conscience. You know you're not doing right.

  • However, in practice, the lack of differentiation between who deserves help and who doesn’t did not necessarily translate into a universal application of such principles. Although the data unquestionably demonstrated the integration of the normative to help others into participants’ individual and national identity, participants’ willingness and experienced duty to help others stopped at a variety of points of distance between the helping self and the needy other.

1.2.Why Help?

Conversely, in other cases several participants’ altruistic practices were motivated by more self-centred concerns, i.e., by what the helper gets from helping.

  • When focusing on themselves, the two most frequently given reasons for helping were notions of karmic retribution and that helping makes people feel good. For example:

Fawzia: Yeah, I think that's my good deed for the day, something good will happen to me.

Meg: The reason why I give, it makes me feel good about myself.

  • Sometimes karmic ideas of ‘what goes around comes around’ were mixed with principles of reciprocity.

Alistair: So, if someone is suffering today, maybe they will be there for me one day if I am suffering or my family member is suffering, because times change.

Andrew: Yes, I agree. It’s karma, isn't it?

  • Participants also commented that they liked helping, that being able to help others gave them a sense of achievement, and some explained that helping made them feel more hopeful.
  • Some participants also expressed‘cheap participation’ motives, wherebygiving enabled participants to temporarily silence humanitarian agencies and disconnect from humanitarian issues with a clear conscience.

Isla: Yes, that's in your sitting room and you can just turn the TV off and block it out completely. You're almost saying Q< I can give £20 but just don't bother me with anything you know? That's how I feel that it is.

1.2.1. Other Focused Motives:

  • When focusing on the sufferer, many participants helped because they vicariously identified with the sufferer and recognised the shared vulnerability. Others because they felt guilty.

Polly: “Then my son has an eating disorder so now I’m also involved with an eating disorder charity and I'm on a local voluntary group for eating disorders. And I also have involvement with other charities but with other things that have, you know, touched me, have affected me over the years. Mental health issues in particular, because I seem to have, with my son’s eating disorder, I drifted onto the mental health side of it, so I now do unpaid work. I’m vice-chairman of the local Mental Health Forum and I sit on the local health boards, Planning & Implementation Board, and, you know, lots of different things like that”.

Marianne:Yes. There has been certain occasions when things have happened on the television that I’ve given to it, you know, I’ve phoned in and pledged and all that kind of thing. And part of that is that there’s a part of me that thinks that if I was involved in a disaster, I’d like to think that somebody would help me.[…] I’d like to think that somebody was there for me.

1.2.2.Hierarchies of Care:

  • Participants made use of a range of principles to prioritise those who should be helped first or at all. These everyday principles ranged from a prioritisation of blood ties and parochialism, pragmatic criteria and reciprocity to hierarchies of deservingness.
  • Correspondingly, although there seemed to be considerable agreement on the general moral principles discussed above, there was no uniformity in how they were applied. Across the groups, participants discussed how they prioritised giving help, with the beneficiary positioned at different degrees of closeness/distance from the self. The following hierarchy of care emerged, in order of increasing distance of the beneficiary from the self.
  1. ‘Me and mine’ – ‘the closest to you’
  2. One’s own children and immediate family
  3. Extended family
  4. Local community
  5. Regional community (respectively for those coming from England, Scotland and Wales)
  6. Taxpayers living in Britain
  7. Britain – ‘my people’
  8. ‘Whoever is wronged inside or outside the UK’
  9. ‘The world is my family’, ‘I’m a citizen of the world’

How participants positioned themselves on this spectrum was uneven, with the overall majority positioning themselves at levels 1-4 of prioritisation.

1.3. Socio-Cultural Context:

Additionally to moral principles and hierarchies of care, participants mentioned several socio-historical factors when discussing their understanding and attitudes towards helping, both locally and to distant sufferers.

  • Many participants made reference to feelings of distrust or to a climate of distrust. Many spoke of distrusting the British government and the Media and the way news are manipulated for political purposes.

Harold: […]And it’s a bit like immigration, where people say the country’s overrun with immigrants, and it isn’t really; it’s just that, you know, the vested interests like to make you feel that they are.

Alistair: Yes, media and charities, and also politics as well I think. They are all connected in one way. I think politicians sometimes don’t want the media to show certain things because it may cost the government a lot of money themselves to get involved, because when there is a disaster in the world, charities do get involved, governments do get involved, everyone gets involved, the United Nations, everyone. So, I think it will cost more to help them, in a way, and that’s why no one wants to hear about it.