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Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies



Reduce by How Much? Calibrating Meat Reduction Appeals to Maximise Their Effectiveness

From PHAIR Society [The Society for the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations]
November 2021

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.

hamburger
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.

PHAIR Society


Posted on All-Creatures.org: October 22, 2024
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