It's a difficult task and high-quality evidence often requires studies that are very time- and resource-intensive, for example, measuring participants’ actual meat consumption over longer periods of time. Our hope is that we will see more collaboration between advocacy groups and scientists on these questions in the future, for example, via forums such as PHAIR.
Amirali Mirhashemian, Unsplash
An interview with Sophie Cameron, Matti Wilks, and Bastian Jaeger
about their open-access PHAIR article, ‘Reduce by how much?‘, which
considers what might be the optimal request we can make to consumers
to hasten meat reduction.
Sophie, Matti and Bastian, could you each briefly introduce
yourselves?
I’m Sophie Cameron, I completed my PhD and post-doctoral fellowship
in moral developmental psychology at the University of Queensland.
My research focuses on when children develop an understanding of
moral character, and how it affects both their own behaviour and
their evaluation of others’ behaviour. I am passionate about animal
welfare and fascinated by the complicated relationship that human
societies have with animals and meat.
I’m Matti Wilks, I’m a lecturer (assistant professor) in the
Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. I completed
my PhD at the University of Queensland and was a postdoc at
Princeton and Yale Universities. My research draws from social and
developmental approaches to understand our moral motivations and
actions. I am most fascinated by our moral circles and the factors
that shape who we do and do not grant moral status to. In other
research, I also examine
attitudes towards cultured meat, as well as understanding the
intersection between AI and psychology.
I’m Bastian Jaeger, I’m an assistant professor in the Department of
Social Psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. My
background is in social cognition and behavioural economics and most
of my research in the past focused on questions around first
impressions – how we form them, how accurate they are, and how they
influence decision-making. Once I had a more secure position in
academia, I decided to look for a research topic where I felt that I
could have more impact. Now, most of my research focuses on the
intersection between animal welfare, moral psychology, and behaviour
change. I am interested in applied questions, such as how to reduce
meat consumption, and more foundational questions, such as how
people think about the moral standing of non-human animals.
You recently investigated the topic of what might be the
optimal request when approaching people about reducing their meat
consumption. What inspired this research and what were some of the
key findings?
There’s a long-standing debate about what is the most effective
strategy for sustained behaviour change. Should we aim for
incremental improvements that are easier to achieve, such as
advocating for small reductions in meat consumption (e.g., Meatless
Mondays) or minor changes in animal welfare standards? Or should we
focus on a more demanding message, advocating for veganism or the
abolition of factory farms? There are good arguments on both sides.
Small changes might lead to complacency and prevent more important
changes in the future, but they might also be more practical and
feasible for people, slowly transforming public opinion and actually
facilitating future changes. Ultimately, these are hypotheses that
we should test – and that’s what we wanted to tackle in our paper.
In your recent PHAIR paper, you point out that asking people
to completely eliminate meat from their diets may not be optimal to
reduce overall meat consumption in the world. Why might this be the
case?
Our paper is based on a simple, but also important observation. If
the goal is to reduce how much meat is consumed overall, then we
need to consider how many people consume how much
meat. Different appeals that aim to reduce meat consumption likely
impact these two variables in a different way. An appeal to
eliminate meat consumption altogether may be ignored by most people
because it is so demanding. But the few people that do comply with
it change their consumption by a lot. So we get a lot of reduction,
but only a few people taking action. Contrast that with what we
might observe with a much less demanding appeal to cut, for example,
10% of meat from your diet. Many more people will probably comply
with it because it’s easier to do, but they will only change their
consumption by a little. So, we get a small reduction by a lot of
people.
It’s not clear which strategy will lead to the greatest reduction in
meat consumption overall. This depends entirely on how many
people will comply with each appeal. It is also possible that
the appeal that is optimal for overall meat reduction lies somewhere
in the middle. That’s what we set out to test in our studies.
It’s not clear which strategy will lead to the greatest reduction in meat consumption overall. This depends entirely on how many people will comply with each appeal.
What did your research suggest in the most optimal request?
In our studies, we asked participants whether they would comply with
meat reduction appeals that varied in how demanding they were. We
first gave some reasons for reducing meat consumption and informed
participants about the increasing number of people who are cutting
back. Then participants indicated whether they would be open to
reducing their meat consumption by different amounts, ranging from
10% all the way to 100%, for the duration of a week. We also asked
them how much meat they eat in a typical week. This allowed us to
look at two things.
First, as we suspected, we found that the more demanding the appeal
was, the fewer participants agreed to cut their meat consumption by
that amount. For example, in our sample of US participants, almost
90% said they would be open to reducing meat consumption by 10%,
whereas only 25% said they would be open to eliminating meat from
their diet entirely for a week (note that, although we encouraged
participants to follow up on their intended reduction, we did not
test whether they actually did, which means that the actual
willingness to reduce consumption is likely lower).
More importantly, we could calculate for each requested reduction
how much meat consumption was reduced overall. Our results
consistently suggested that mid-range requests – asking for a
reduction of around 50% – would be most effective in reducing
overall meat consumption, more effective than the most demanding
appeal (100% reduction) and the least demanding appeal (10%
reduction) (see Figure, right side).
Was there much cross-cultural variability around this
optimum?
What the optimal request is will ultimately depend on how many
people are open to cutting back their meat consumption by various
amounts. To get some idea of how much the optimal request varies, we
ran the same analysis with four different groups of participants. We
recruited a total of 500 people from Australia, the UK, and the
United States via the online recruitment platform Prolific. These
countries are, of course, relatively similar in terms of culture.
Nonetheless, we were still a little surprised by how similar the
results looked. In all three countries, mid-range requests around
50% were more effective than both the more demanding and the less
demanding requests.
In all three countries, mid-range requests around 50% were more
effective than both the more demanding and the less demanding
requests.
We also recruited a sample of 200 university students from the
Netherlands (participants represented in the above Figure). Overall,
they were more open to reducing their meat consumption than our
older, more demographically diverse participants from the
Anglosphere. But we again saw that mid-range requests (50%-70%) were
more effective than the more demanding and the less demanding
requests.
There is, of course, more work that needs to be done here to
understand how the optimal request varies across populations and
which characteristics of a population are most important for
determining the optimal request. However, our results suggest that
mid-range requests around a 50% reduction may be better than much
less or much more demanding requests.
Do you have a sense of whether mid-range requests are a
feasible goal for most consumers?
It is safe to say that not every participant in our study who said
they would be open to reducing their consumption by about 50% (which
is about 60% of our US sample, for example) would actually do it. We
also only asked about people’s willingness to reduce for a week. It
is difficult to say how many people would try it but then go back to
their regular diet after a week of reduction. We know that achieving
widespread, sustained behaviour change is difficult, especially for
behaviours that have a lot of “pull factors”. If I already eat meat,
then continuing to do so is easier and more convenient in many ways.
Personally, we would guess that in the countries we studied, only a
minority of people would try out a short-term reduction by about 50%
and even fewer would stick to it over a period of months.
Ultimately, we need more research that actually measures
participants’ meat consumption in response to different requests to
figure this out.
How would you like to see animal advocates applying your
research?
Because of the many difficulties that we mentioned, it is difficult
to make very confident recommendations. We would highlight two
general points. A lot of discourse seems to focus on the extreme
ends of a continuum: abolitionist approaches pushing for veganism
versus small asks that could find broad adoption. Our findings
suggest that the request that is most successful in reducing overall
consumption may well lie somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
More importantly, we hope that our paper shows one way in which this
important question could be tested empirically. We think it’s
important to adopt an evidence-based approach when trying to figure
out what works best for the animals in the long run. Unfortunately,
we often lack the strong evidence that is needed to address this
question with confidence. It’s a difficult task and high-quality
evidence often requires studies that are very time- and
resource-intensive, for example, measuring participants’ actual meat
consumption over longer periods of time. Our hope is that we will
see more collaboration between advocacy groups and scientists on
these questions in the future, for example, via forums such as
PHAIR.