Reduce Or Go Veg - Effects On Meal Choice (Faunalytics)
Background
Probably the biggest debate in dietary advocacy is around what to ask for. In this study, we tested two key strategies against one another: asking for meat reduction versus going vegetarian.
The advocacy method was as realistic as possible: The videos described the diverse benefits of plant-based eating, showed some mild factory farm footage, and described changing social norms around meat consumption to convey a growing trend. Participants were also asked if they would be willing to take a dietary pledge (either for meat reduction or vegetarianism). Pledges and other types of explicit commitment have been used effectively in environmental advocacy and other domains to increase behavioral follow-through.
Key Findings
- Advocating for meat reduction led to more meatless meal purchases than advocating for vegetarianism. After a reduction advocacy video, 25.8% of participants ordered a meatless meal, versus 18.9% after a vegetarian advocacy video (a marginally significant difference). This result suggests that reduction advocacy will have more of a positive impact for animals than vegetarian (or, by extension, vegan) advocacy.
- A large part of the reason was that almost four times as many people were willing to pledge to reduce as to pledge to cut out meat entirely. While the majority of participants in this study (59.4%) were willing to take the meat-reduction pledge, only 15.4% were willing to take the vegetarian pledge. This greater willingness to take the reduction pledge explained (mediated) most of the difference in the success between the reduction and vegetarian advocacy videos.
- Advocates need to strengthen our reduction pledges to maximize psychological commitment as much as possible. This is obvious in this study, which used very weak pledges (for methodological reasons) and found that only 31.7% of people who took the meat-reduction pledge ordered a meatless meal after the study.
- There is far more evidence for the impact of stronger reduction pledges than for better vegetarian (or vegan) messaging. 47.8% of people who took the vegetarian pledge ordered a meatless meal, significantly more than the percentage for the reduction pledge. In other words, though uptake was almost four times higher with reduction advocacy, follow-through was higher with vegetarian advocacy. There are three main reasons we suggest reduction advocacy:
- First, the bottom line of the study was that reduction advocacy led to more meatless orders than vegetarian advocacy—the difference in uptake outweighed the difference in follow-through.
- Second, there is strong evidence from many studies that well-done pledges increase follow-through on a desired behavior, whereas the evidence for well-done advocacy increasing uptake (willingness to go vegetarian or vegan) is, at best, weakly positive.
- Finally, this study found a small negative effect of vegetarian advocacy on meat consumption relative to the control condition, suggesting it may sometimes be harmful to the cause.
- The results show the importance of considering both uptake and follow-through when conducting research on campaign success. When considering how successful a campaign is, researchers must take willingness to participate into account to avoid substantial bias.