Human Rights as a Lay Category of Thought: Content and Structure in the United States

What are human rights? Although legal scholars point to a growing list of international entitlements, social scientists have highlighted underlying ideological assumptions and the selective interpretation of human rights in practice. Lay conceptualizations of human rights, however, merit further examination. This study brings together human rights research and cognitive sociology, deploying a novel, online task-based study to explore the content and structure of human rights as a lay category of thought. To do so, the authors examine rights exemplars, perceived violations, goodness of fit, and response times in a sample of adults in the United States. The findings suggest that freedom of speech is a cognitive prototype. Civil and political rights were prominent in respondents’ minds relative to economic, social, and cultural rights. There were substantive exceptions in both directions; certain political rights, such as asylum, were peripheral or dismissed from the human rights concept, while health care, food, and education were salient. Results indicate that respondents were disposed to include content within the human rights category when asked. This study garners insights on how ordinary people perceive and understand human rights in the United States, breaking ground for further comparative research.