Dr. Melanie Joy analyzes the main reasons for the incredible success of Gary Yourofsky’s speech in Israel

We asked Dr. Melanie Joy to specify what are the main reasons Gary Yourofsky’s speech has such an incredible success here in Israel. Dr. Joy is a Harvard-educated psychologist, personal/relationship coach, professor of psychology and sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and celebrated speaker. She has written a number of articles on psychology, animal protection, and social justice, which have been published in a variety of journals and magazines. Dr. Joy is the leading researcher on the psychology of eating meat on which you can read here: Carnism: Changing the Way We Think About Eating Animals.

These are the main reasons Gary Yourofsky is so effective, according to Dr. Joy:

1. His authenticity — emotional, cognitive — is clear and he comes across as genuine.
2. His passion is also clear, and it is contagious.
3. The way he frames the issues makes the ethical truth of what he’s saying very difficult to dispute.
4. His argument is not overly intellectual and is easy to follow.
5. His style of communicating is engaging and people automatically pay attention when they might otherwise tune out (this is one of the most important reasons, in Joy’s opinion).
6. In general, people can relate to him — he comes across as “just like they are” in many ways.
7. He engages on all levels because he’s communicating from all levels: head, heart, gut.
8. He mixes humor and seriousness well.
9. He’s masculine and dispels the feminine/weak vegan stereotype.

Joy thinks there are some minor changes Yourofsky could make that would make the speech even more powerful than it is.

And one last sentence from Joy:
Effective presentations have a back-and-forth flow between “opposites” such as head/heart, serious/funny, theoretical/factual, fast/slow (talking) etc. Yourofsky does this well.