Andrea Polanco, Faunalytics
To start off, I’d like to explain my background a little, as I’m not a sociologist! I’m a Research Scientist specializing in the psychology of meat consumption at Faunalytics. We run studies that ask people about their thoughts and opinions on animal agriculture, to experiments that test whether or not animal advocacy tactics make people go vegan, for example. In this blog, I’ll be discussing some key findings from such an experiment.
Vegan animal advocacy assumes that exposing people to depictions of farmed animal suffering will cause feelings of sympathy and/or behavior change (e.g., reducing or eliminating animal products from one’s diet). Our latest experiment tested this assumption directly, and the results are a little complicated, as I presented at the International Association Vegan Sociologists Conference.
We showed over 1,400 adults in the United States a short video or article about farmed animal suffering (or a neutral video/article about stained glass) and surveyed the same participants two weeks and three months later. The educational, street outreach, and undercover videos were taken directly from Instagram and YouTube Reels from animal advocacy groups, while the news articles and op-ed articles were recent news publications about litigation against an animal agriculture company for animal abuse violations. We also had recipe videos (these just showed a person cooking a vegan meal), sanctuary videos (these depicted rescued farmed animals at a sanctuary), and protest articles (these covered a grocery store protest).
Unsurprisingly, animal advocacy content that featured animal suffering impacted people emotionally — participants were significantly more likely to report more anger, disgust, fear, anxiety, and sadness after watching footage of farmed animal suffering compared to participants in the neutral (“control”) condition. As well, recipe and sanctuary videos were the only content to significantly increase positive emotions, like happiness or feelings of desire. However, these emotions didn’t translate into any measurable shift in self-reported animal product consumption, policy support, or moral concern for farmed animals across the sample as a whole.
Most striking, some groups of people, who in the past have been shown to be animal allies, such as women, Democrats, and vegetarians, actually moved in the opposite direction. After watching a video of street outreach or reading a news article about a disruptive protest, some of these “allies” selected fewer animals when asked to select those that they feel morally obligated to show concern for (this is referred to as moral concern). We speculate that a bystander effect, or something like it, took place: seeing an advocate confront the issue allowed the participant (i.e, the bystander) to feel as if the work was already being handled by someone else.
This doesn’t mean that digital advocacy is pointless. Indeed, our experimental design purposely removed any call to action and tested just one exposure, which isn’t how vegan advocacy is done in the real world. However, we had to make these decisions to isolate the cause-and-effect of digital activism. This is the biggest challenge of running animal advocacy experiments — we can’t always perfectly mirror real life settings.
From a sociological perspective, the results of our experiment raises questions about advocacy that is seen as “disruptive” or “confrontational,” such as whether a visible advocate on the screen (or featured in a news story) inspires people, or does it let onlookers outsource the moral responsibility to others? We hope future research can answer such questions.
Andrea Polanco is a social science researcher at Faunalytics with a PhD in animal welfare science from the University of Guelph. With both an academic background and experience in grassroots advocacy, Andrea is passionate about how research can inform and strengthen the animal advocacy movement—from understanding the psychological factors that shape people’s attitudes and behaviors toward animals, to examining equity within the movement itself. She is driven by a belief in collective liberation (the idea that no group can be free while others are oppressed) and seeks to align her research and advocacy with that vision. Andrea also values rest and joy, which for her include birding, discovering new TV shows, and relaxing with her cat companion Zupa/Sopa (‘soup’).