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Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies

Reversing roles: Testing the impact of perspective-switching on attitudes towards using animals

From PHAIR Society [The Society for the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations]
September 2024

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.

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: September 12, 2024
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