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Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

I was delighted to hear that the Washington State Senate passed a bill Wednesday legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. The Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger has been closely following the bill’s progress for several weeks, not only liveblogging the debate but also posting numerous excellent speeches on behalf of the bill.  Eli Sanders highlighted Republican Senator Cheryl Pflug’s speech as the best of the night, which she ended with the following words:

“And so I commend this bill to you today because it is part of our struggle to recognize that everybody, whether they look like us or believe like us, has an opportunity—should have an opportunity to enjoy those personal freedoms we hold dear.”

The essential argument Pflug makes here—that gay citizens should enjoy rights equal to those of heterosexuals—relies on straight individuals being brought to recognize their commonality with gays.  Harvey Milk long ago made this argument when he urged gays to come out, to represent themselves publicly as gay to “destroy the lies and distortions.”  More recently, the Australian “independent, grass-roots community advocacy organization” GetUp! posted an ad on YouTube on behalf of same-sex marriage in that country.  This beautiful, moving ad works because its visuals work in concert with old-school persuasive tools.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The distinguished philosopher (and originally professor of logic at Glasgow) Adam Smith briefly explains persuasion in his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments thus:

“To approve of another man’s opinions is to adopt those opinions, and to adopt them is to approve of them.  If the same arguments which convince you convince me likewise, I necessarily approve of your conviction; and if they do not, I necessarily disapprove of it.”

In other words, effective argumentation exists when two individuals share common opinions and the arguments used by one speaker are found convincing by both of them.  This doesn’t quite work as the 1759 version of How to Win Friends and Influence People because Smith doesn’t explain what arguments are equally efficacious for you and your audience, but he does present a non-agonistic tool for persuasion: sympathy.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Sympathy, as Smith defines it, “may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” (5).  The purpose of sympathy is to bring individuals together in mutual understanding.  While we cannot literally feel the emotions of others, Smith explains that we can use our imaginations to bridge the gap:

“As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.  Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.  They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him, and thence form some idea of his sensation, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” (2)

Smith may seem to be a bit-outdated by about 250 years, but recent studies in cognitive science and social psychology offer some evidence for his views.  Studies in affect like Teresa Brennan’s suggest that emotions can travel between individuals within social environments; more relevant, however, is the formulation by cognitive scientists like Alvin Goldman of “perspective shifting,” which is a state in which we “imagin[e] being in that other person’s position, and thus us[e] our imagined thoughts and feelings and decisions to determine what the other will think and feel and decide” (Coplan and Goldie xxxiii).  In short, what the GetUp! ad does is to use visuals to create a moment of perspective shifting; watching the ad here will give you a sense of how this works

The ad notably puts the viewer right in the middle of a romantic comedy—there’s a meet-cute on a boat where a handsome man named Paul gives the viewer his number, and then the progress of the relationship follows all the way through fun in the sun, domestic disputes, personal tragedies, all the way to a marriage proposal.  The ad beautifully subverts the Hollywood script, however, when the camera turns and reveals that the viewer has not been looking from the perspective of a straight woman, but a gay man.

 Image Credit:  Screenshot from YouTube

However, the ad does not deal in the extraordinary.  While there are breathtaking views of riding on boats and rollercoasters, most of what is shown is extremely banal: grocery shopping, moving furniture, meeting parents, and even fights about driving directions.  Yet it uses poignant images like a hand on a shoulder to invite the viewer to think about the experience of sympathizing with a partner losing his mother.  These gestures taken out of any context read as truly loving, and the viewer is brought to see that this relationship, no matter the parties involved, is like any other romantic partnership.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

In 2010 the New York Times reported on a study conducted by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation “that looked at the reasons behind society's evolving tolerance for gay people. It found that the reason cited most frequently by people who reported having more favorable views—by far—was knowing someone who is gay.”  By using these images, GetUp! attempts to reach out to individuals who may not know a gay or lesbian person by inviting them to place themselves in the position of a gay or lesbian individual.  The building violins at the ad’s end, in which the camera’s perspective performs the critical shift, create the kairotic moment that the only words in the ad echo:  “It’s time.  End marriage discrimination.”  Hopefully, more ads like this one will bring that time closer.