Who Cares About Human Rights?

By Alex Garinther and Andrew Quist

Sam McFarland at Western Kentucky University has been asking this question for years. By sending surveys to Americans around the country, he and his colleagues have tried to determine which pockets of the population really care about human rights.

Who is most likely to show concern for Rohingya Muslims facing genocide in Myanmar? Or as the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China, experience the largest mass internment of its kind since WWII, who among us is likely to speak out? To see how they can help? Not everyone does—what do we know about those who do?

McFarland’s work tries to identify the characteristics of a person that best predict concern for issues like these. Does it have something to do with age, gender, or ethnicity? Political orientation and personal history stand out as likely candidates. Some of the answers, like dispositional empathy, are obvious, though others might surprise you.

The More You Know

One predictor for concern about human rights is what McFarland calls global knowledge. It’s a measure of how many world history facts a person can accurately recall. And while McFarland and colleagues have catalogued Americans’ global knowledge and how strong of a predictor it is in comparison to other variables (like self-reported liberalism, religiosity, or ethnocentrism), this isn’t the first time this correlation has surfaced. Evidence for it dates back to 1951, just after the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights following WWII. At that time, Grace and Van Velzer (1951) asked college students to rate their agreement with specific statements pulled directly from the UN’s Declaration. They found that students who knew more about various nations around the globe (e.g., Liberia, Egypt, the former Soviet Union) were the same students likely to agree with the ideals of the Declaration.

According to the old adage, “ignorance is bliss.” What the research of McFarland et al. suggests is when it comes to ameliorating human suffering, the opposite can also be true: knowledge is power.

Try your hand at the Global Knowledge Test by working through our version below. These questions are based on the original measures published by McFarland and Mathews in 2005 with a few recent updates.