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Going Vegan Or Vegetarian- Motivations & Influences (Faunalytics)

Background

When it comes to vegan and vegetarian (vegn) diets, people’s reasons for adopting them are among the most studied. For instance, studies have shown that health, environmental, and animal protection motivations are the most common in the U.S. (Faunalytics, 2014)—though they are not necessarily the same in other countries (e.g., India; Vietnam; the Netherlands). Research also suggests that people with ethical motivations tend to stay vegn longer than those with health motivations (Faunalytics, 2014; Hoffman et al., 2013). In this study, we investigated the association of these different motivations with success over time. We expected to replicate the findings about the most common motivations and to find, similarly, that people with animal protection motivations would be more successful in their transition.

In addition to these motivations themselves, we can also think about the source of a motivation: whether it is self-driven or externally motivated. Past research focusing on health behaviors has shown that people are more likely to attain and maintain goals that they adopt for self-driven (intrinsic) reasons than goals that they adopt to please others (Williams et al., 1996). In this study, we predicted that the same would be true for going veg*n. For instance, even for two people with the same motivation, such as animal protection, we would expect one who sees that motivation as an important part of who they are to be more successful in their goal than one who mainly wants other people to approve of it.

General motivations such as health or environmental concern are only one way to think about the reasons for going vegn. Underlying those explicit motivations is a psychological orientation known as speciesism: the belief that humans are worth more than members of other species. Speciesism is associated with vegnism. For instance, Caviola et al. (2018) showed that vegetarians are less speciesist than non-vegetarians. However, we don’t have clear evidence about which comes first. Are people willing to go vegn because they’re not very speciesist, or does going vegn open them up to anti-speciesist thinking so they become less speciesist over time? This is one of the questions we investigated in this study.

Finally, apart from the general and the psychological, we also need to consider specific occurrences that influence people to go vegn, from watching a documentary about animal suffering to following a doctor’s advice to reduce meat consumption. Researchers have studied a wide range of interventions designed to influence or increase people’s motivations to go vegn for a particular reason (e.g., Mathur et al., 2021). This is especially true among animal advocates, for whom identifying and encouraging those reasons is a central part of dietary advocacy. In this report, we consider how these specific influences are related to success.

Key Findings

  1. Self-driven motivations to go veg*n can be a powerful driver of success. Self-driven motivations come from within a person, like their personal values or moral identity, while external motivations include things like feeling pressured by others to succeed. People with both sources of motivation tend to be the most successful: For instance, 70% of people who scored high on both self-driven and external motivations at the beginning of the study met or exceeded their goal level of animal product consumption by the sixth month, compared to 59% of all participants. While this shows that both sources of motivation can drive success, previous research has found external motivations to be worse for long-term goal maintenance, so we suggest emphasizing self-driven motivations when possible, as detailed in the Recommendations section below.
  2. Participants became less speciesist after going vegn, and those who were more successful in reaching their vegn goals experienced the greatest reduction in speciesism. Over the first six months of a new vegn diet, people’s speciesism decreased significantly. This was particularly true for those who were most successful at their diet. While people going vegn tended to be fairly anti-speciesist compared to the general population anyway, averaging just 1.8 on a 1 to 5 scale, the average dropped to 1.5 over the six months of the study.
  3. Exposure to animal advocacy experiences tended to increase people’s consumption success on their new diets, regardless of whether animal welfare was their primary motivation or not. Namely, people who had seen unpleasant or graphic media of farmed animals (42%), watched a documentary (36%), and/or received information from an animal advocacy group (21%) all did better at reaching their goal level of animal product consumption six months later, even taking into account their general motivations and baseline levels of success. In contrast, people who had received information from a celebrity or influencer (23%) tended to be further from their goal level of consumption than those who hadn’t. Other specific influences may also be important although they did not rise to the top in this study.
  4. Learning particular facts could also increase consumption success, but the context matters. About half of people (51%) had learned about how farmed animals are mistreated, and we found that this experience may reduce success if it is the only influence, but that negative association tended to disappear when experienced along with other influences. More than two-thirds of people (68%) had learned about the health benefits of plant-based eating, which we found was positively associated with success, but that benefit tended to disappear if they had other influential experiences as well. In contrast, learning about farmed animal sentience (which 31% of people had) appeared to be helpful only in combination with other influences—taken alone, it did not have a clear effect on success.
  5. Overall, 42% of people’s veg*n journeys were motivated by health, 20% by animal protection, and 18% by environmental concern. However, these general motivations did not have any effect on how successful people were with their diets. Similar to previous research, health motivations were the most common reason for going vegn. While Faunalytics’ 2014 study found that people with health as their only motivation tended to abandon their diets, the current study suggests that while those people may have been trying out vegnism in a noncommittal way, people who have committed to it are fairly unlikely to abandon it regardless of their primary motivation.

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