Activism around factory farming typically assumes that people already think that animal suffering is bad, so the task at hand is to let them know just how much suffering factory farms cause.1 But by and large, there’s just not very good evidence that this actually changes attitudes or behaviors. Zooming out, at a macro level, the percentage of vegans and vegetarians in America is steady over time. So whatever vegan advocacy is happening is not obviously creating mass culture change. Zooming in to individual persuasion efforts, a recent meta-analysis I led found that when we restrict our attention to just the most rigorous studies, on average, appeals to animal welfare produce approximately zero benefit:
Unfortunately this was true pretty much no matter how the content was delivered — videos, op-eds, and pamphlets all get you a big serving of bupkis. (Here is a table of prior video studies, courtesy of Peter Landry.)
When I wrapped that paper up, I concluded that we had more or less reached the people we were going to reach with vegan propaganda, and instead we should be focusing on 1) policy solutions and 2) marginal changes to eating environments that scale up.
But another possibility: what if all those persuasion efforts are bad actually? What happens if we use materials that are better at changing minds?
These are what I take to be the animating questions of a new paper by Lisa Kramer and Peter Landry, How the Sausage Is Made: Testing the Effectiveness of an Informative Video in Promoting Sustainable Food Consumption. Their study sat some U of T undergrads down and had them watch either a documentary about mushrooms or an excerpt from the documentary Dominion, which is well done and therefore horrible to watch, about how pigs are treated on factory farms.
The study’s real payoff is its measurement strategy. In addition to self-reporting a bunch of attitudinal, demographic, and consumption measures, participants also selected a meal at the local canteen before, immediately after, and a week after they watched their video. Each time, they had a chance of actually receiving the meal, and each time they selected one of five possible proteins: bacon, chicken, steak, tofu, and none.
Turns out, it’s harder to order meat after watching Dominion, and it’s especially harder to order pork after watching the segment on pigs.
Better yet, the effects last:
I’ve updated my beliefs in light of this paper. First, although it’s hard to make people sit through really upsetting footage about factory farms — I had a lot of trouble watching this movie — if you can pull it off, you might durably affect their behavior. If you scale this up enough, you might change a lot of people’s behavior a little, and you also might cause a reasonable number of people to go vegan.2
Second, quality matters. Dominion is a better movie than most in its category. It makes sense to me that it would be more persuasive.
Next up is figuring out just how many people are amenable to this kind of appeal; how long effects last; and whether it works for chicken and fish.
I’d put my personal syllogism like so:
Animals matter, and so does their suffering (premise)
This is as true for dogs as it is for cows, chickens, etc. (premise)
The way we raise animals for food causes an unfathomably huge amount of suffering because of factory farming (premise)
the vast majority of commercially available animal products come from factory farms (premise)
Whether other people are doing something unethical or not doesn’t matter for my ethical obligations (premise)
Example: Other people’s buying products made by slave labor, even if there are so many of them that I can’t expect to have a meaningful impact on the industry as a whole, is neither here nor there for whether I should buy those products myself
I cannot ethically buy products from factory farms (conclusion)
This is as true for animal products like eggs and dairy as it is for meat. There’s a good case to be made that eggs and dairy are substantially worse than beef, for instance. (Which sucks because the two foods I miss most are pizza and egg and cheese on a roll.)
Side note: one reason that I think animal welfare appeals don’t generally produce visible changes in studies is that they strongly militate towards total abstinence from animal products, and most people aren’t ready to do that. Analogy: if someone told you that abusing children is bad which is why they only do it on Saturdays, you’d react with some dismay, one hopes. Likewise, if you think that factory farming is unacceptable, it doesn’t make sense to only eat some of its products, or only eat them sometimes. You have to give it up. By contrast, environmental and health appeals can be met by cutting back.
As I am already convinced of the awfulness of factory farming, I wasn't interested in watching a disturbing documentary about it. This post nudges me to actually watch it so I can reference it when discussing animal suffering.
Also, great blog name!
I wonder how the addition of PBM, TVP, seitan, or even cultivated meats as alternative options would impact the effectiveness of Dominion. Tofu isn't amazingly popular, it has certain stigmas and isn't as close a taste/texture replacement as some others.
Minor point, but your argument as presented isn't strictly valid i.e. the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premises and so someone can accept all premises and plausibly reject the conclusion. You would need a linking premise like "5. If (1-4), then C".
I agree with (4) re: futility objections philosophically, but another point to add is that they are also false empirically. Dr Avi Bitterman has used the data in https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41055-018-00030-4 to model demand threshold exposure for broiler chickens. He found there is a 91.8% chance of triggering the additional supply of 900 chickens over a 75 year period (assuming 30 chickens average per year) and even cutting back to 25% of this still imposes a 46% risk. This of course is in addition to the fact that you are always making it more likely someone else will trigger such an event.