Using What Threatens Rabbits

Rabbits prioritize data differently, as this blog so often describes. This information can be very useful in formulating arguments to motivate rabbits.

A reader and I were discussing the measles outbreak, and the threat that parents should have seen when looking at liberal pro-immigration policies. The conversation drifted to memes that could be exploited, based on this article about the new Measles outbreak, when something occurred to me. The following meme might motivate Rabbits more than the meme above, despite the head scratching it would provoke among conservatives:

Imagine a well known hippy-dippy liberal actress who lobbies on behalf of autism-related issues, but who isn’t at all concerned about illegal immigration. Imagine trying to explain to her how Obama’s immigration policies could bring measles to American children, and thus Obama’s immigration policies were a threat to her child. Although it might mildly bother her, I don’t think the threat of Measles killing her child (mortality is about one in about a thousand patients) would have that much of an effect on her, or move her to immediately become an anti-immigration activist.

Now, imagine telling her that the vaccine companies had Obama import Measles-infected children into America, to create a measles outbreak, so other parents would blame her for opposing the measles-vaccine, and ridicule her group of vaccine skeptics as stupid for opposing vaccinations. In other words, a big corporation had colluded with Obama to marginalize her socially, so they could sell more vaccines, and they were using immigration as a tool to accomplish that.

I think the effect on her position on the immigration surge would be more dramatic. She would oppose it, and Obama, more aggressively. In large part, this would happen because her amygdala would already be preconditioned to see large corporations as a corrupt enemy, using underhanded tactics to attack her. It would also be effective because being a rabbit, she would be acutely sensitive to social attacks designed to diminish her status among her peers and out-group her as an enemy within her group. Finally, a successful entity, succeeding wildly, especially by attacking her, would set off her well-developed envy and anger emotions.

Rabbits think they live in a world where you cannot be killed, realistically. Since they avoid dangerous service such as military or law enforcement duty, and often live in affluent areas, they are usually correct in their assessment of the threat. However as a result, their amygdala is conditioned to ignore all threats to life as insignificant. This conditioning can cause them to even ignore the occasional, but real threat to their safety which might arise on occasion.

In the rabbit’s world however, there is a constant roil of social attacks, parries, and hierarchy shifts. Threats to social status and underhanded dealings are common, and their amygdalae are conditioned to look out for, and focus them upon such stimuli.

Thus if you point out to a rabbit how measles could kill their children, they will mostly shrug their shoulders. But if you point out the much less likely scenario that there is a nefarious government collusion, designed specifically to out-group them among their peers, you will see that data flagged as significant, focused upon, and ultimately acted upon aggressively. The more likely, logical, and dangerous warning of the immigration surge killing their children would be ignored, but the less dangerous threat of damage to social status would provoke a much more aggressive emotional response.

Before I unraveled my narcissist, I operated with an assumption that those I was loyal to would be loyal to me. As a result, my amygdala failed to flag a myriad of stimuli which I should have flagged as vitally important. I just wasn’t conditioned to flag those curious moments as significant, so when they happened, I noted something was weird about the moment, but it quickly dropped from my radar as I looked for other data I knew to be important. As a result I was flagging irrelevant data, ignoring the most important, and operating illogically. If your amygdala is conditioned to see one stimuli, and not another, you will only flag that one stimuli, and you will ignore the other.

It may pay to begin looking at how to motivate support for conservatism, not by clearly explaining how an issue is important and drawing attention to real threats, but rather, by looking for how to relate the issue to something which is already important to the target audience due to their history of interests and activism. In the case of rabbits, one must explain how the bad outcome you wish to avoid will impact the rabbit’s social status, and allow a powerful entity to turn their group upon them.

If the audience’s amygdala is not already conditioned to flag the presented argument as important, you might as well not say anything. Find the triggers however, and you can trigger the action.