How might portraying humans as victims at the hands of animals increase our sympathy for animals who suffer at our hands? Re: video: Parallel World Animals-Humans
See Anthrozoos article: Reducing Speciesism: An Intervention to Change People’s Attitudes and Behavioral Intention
Photo: Alexander Andrews, Unsplash
An interview with Dr Marielle Stel about her recent research
published in Anthrozoos on the value of perspective taking for
attitude change. Do role reversal interventions work? If so, what
might they be doing?
Marielle, could you briefly introduce yourself?
My name is Marielle Stel and I am currently working as an associate
professor at the University of Twente (The Netherlands). I graduated
as a social psychologist with specific interests in empathy and
behaviour change. The research I’ve conducted so far can be broadly
described as empowering individuals and society to enhance their
safety for both physical threats (disasters and crises, including
pandemics and climate change) as well as social threats (other
people’s antisocial, egocentric behavior, deception). In my recent
lines of work, I have been studying how to facilitate behaviour
change towards a more compassionate and sustainable world, for
instance, by aiming to increase the moral standing of animals.
Regarding my personal interests, I love spending time with my four
rescue cats, taking relaxing walks in nature, and bouldering.
You recently investigated a ‘role reversal’ intervention to
change people’s attitudes and behavioural intentions towards using
animals. What inspired this research and what were some of the key
findings?
We were interested to what extent some of the existing interventions
used by animal activists (e.g., Peta) would indeed lead to a change
in attitudes and behaviours towards animals. We choose to
investigate the role reversal intervention (video:
Parallel World Animals-Humans) as it included aspects that could theoretically change
speciesism (e.g., creating awareness of how animals are being
treated, facilitating taking the animal’s viewpoint, and emotional
reactions towards observing unjustified suffering).
In two studies, we showed that this intervention led participants to
more strongly intend to reduce their harmful behaviour towards
animals, compared to a control condition with no video intervention.
These behaviours included reducing the use of products for which
animals were used (e.g., meat, dairy, cosmetics, medicines) and
using animals for entertainment. Further analysis showed that this
reduction in behavioural intentions was due to participants feeling
a sense of injustice. There were no effects of the intervention on
speciesist attitudes or signing an animal rights petition. So this
intervention shows promise as people intended to change some
behaviours that cause animals harm.
Could you say more about the ‘role reversal’ element of the
video intervention. This seemed to depict animals as perpetrators of
exploitative acts on humans. How might portraying humans as victims
at the hands of animals increase our sympathy for animals who suffer
at our hands?
We hypothesised that due to the role reversal element, the video may
facilitate taking the animals’ viewpoint. Showing the reversed roles
of animals and humans leads people to have to switch mentally.
Furthermore, by showing a parallel world, activists hope that people
become more aware of what we are doing to our animals and how awful
this would be when the same would happen to us humans.
You are right that the animals become the perpetrators here, but it
seems that the overarching message came across rather than the
thought that animals would and could do that to humans. This is, for
instance, reflected in increased feelings of injustice reported by
participants when having watched the video, which in turn reduced
intended harmful behaviours toward animals.
Do you worry that, in some contexts, it might backfire to
portray animals as the perpetrators of violence?
I do not worry about that for the reasons just mentioned. However,
if animals were portrayed as perpetrators of violence consistently
and for a long period of time, for instance, in the media, on
product packages, etc., it indeed may influence people’s attitudes
towards animals negatively.
The ‘role reversal’ video seems to be increasing behavioural
intentions via a sense of injustice. How might ‘role reversal’
images create this sense of injustice?
That is a good question. Feelings of injustice can be elicited when
people learn about the suffering while taking perspective. So
together with showing how animals are being treated (which does not
necessarily have to be role reversed) and the role reversal aspect,
this sense of injustice may have been elicited when watching the
video. We did not find, however, that the video influenced
perspective taking in itself, but it did influence feelings of
injustice. Also, we did not have a condition showing these same
pictures but without the role reversal. Thus, we cannot be certain
whether this specific aspect of the video is necessary to obtain the
effects.
Do you think this ‘role reversal’ method may be more
effective than just having participants assume the perspective of
victimised animals? Is this something you are currently testing?
No, I do not think it is necessarily more effective. Here, we were
interested in whether these often-shared illustrations would
actually have an effect. I believe that facilitating perspective
taking more directly, for instance, by explicitly asking people to
do so, might be more straightforward. Also, you do not have to worry
about possible unwanted perpetrator effects.
We are not (yet) currently testing whether the video without role
reversal would be as effective. We did conduct related studies on
perspective taking. In two studies, we demonstrated that showing the
suffering of animals alone is not sufficient to reduce speciesism
(see preprint here). We showed that taking the perspective of the
animals is crucial to obtain a reduction in speciesist attitudes and
actual animal product consumption.
Importantly, the prejudice literature suggests that we should
facilitate “imagine-self” perspective taking (imagining oneself in
the situation of another individual) rather than “imagine-other”
perspective taking (imagining how the other individual feels).
Vorauer and Sasaki (2014) reported that the imagine-other
perspective taking actually hindered prejudice reduction as this
type of perspective-taking ironically led participants to focus more
on how their own group was viewed by the outgroup rather than how
the outgroup feels.
The video intervention was accompanied by sad music. Is the
sad music essential to the intervention? Does it create a mood or
tone that is essential for the intervention to work?
We did not test this, but I am guessing that the sad music is not
essential for the intervention to work. It does create a mood that
may strengthen the effect. That would be interesting to investigate.
Happy music would probably reduce or neutralise the effects as some
people may then interpret the illustrations as being funny.
The intervention altered people’s behavioural intentions but
not their speciesist attitudes. Could your measure of speciesism be
contributing to this null finding? (The Speciesism Scale is
generally used to measure stable attitudes that vary between people
rather than within.)
We agree it is indeed tricky to try and change such a stable
attitude. Yet, we are interested in trying to find this ‘holy
grail’: if/when people would change their beliefs about humans being
morally superior, together with how morally acceptable they regard
using animals for human aims. This would hopefully change their
compassionate and sustainable behaviour more consistently. In the
recently conducted perspective-taking studies I just talked about
(see preprint), our intervention did reduce speciesist attitudes,
measured with the Speciesism Scale.
Next steps: What are some outstanding questions from this
research? Where would you like to take this research?
In general, my research focuses on the broader outstanding question
of what aspects are needed to reduce speciesism and social
dominance. Most people do not want to harm animals, yet they still
do. I am interested in how to best inform and help people to reduce
this inconsistency and overcome the many barriers that exist.
How would you like to see such an intervention applied by
animal advocates?
The ‘how’ does not really matter to me, when the knowledge we create
is helpful for animal advocates. When published, all interventions
will be freely available to use. But the knowledge can be applied in
other ways as well; for instance, by explicitly asking people to
take the perspective of animals when showing images of animal
suffering.