Testing Grand Narratives About Animal Freedom (Animal Think Tank)

This report contains a summary of findings which has been reproduced exactly as requested.

Summary of findings

Method

A representative sample of 2,000 participants residing in the UK was recruited via the Prolific platform, adhering to the demographic proportions for sex, age, and ethnicity. Participants completed a survey which measured different aspects of their attitudes towards animal freedom, as well as their political orientation and values. Each participant then read one of 20 messages, followed by the animal attitude scale again.

Results

We found four messages that led to a more significant pre-post increase in support for farming abolition compared to the control: Social Progress (+12.7%), Good Life 2 (+14.1%), Intelligence 1 (+10.5%), Intelligence 2 (+10%), and Morality 2 (+10.4%). Additionally, Intelligence 2 was observed to decrease perceptions of negative impacts (-10% compared to +9.71% in the control).

We also analysed the impact of individual differences on animal attitudes. Four individual factors were found to predict stronger support for animal freedom: Biocentric Universalism, Libertarianism (vs. Authoritarianism), Political Left (vs. Right), and Human Benevolence. These were positively correlated with viewing animal freedom as social progress, perceiving other animals as 'just like us,' and supporting farming abolition, while negatively correlated with perceiving negative impacts of abolition, justifications for farming, maintaining the status quo, and levels of speciesism. Conversely, two factors—Power and Achievement values, and Security and Conformity values—predicted lower support for animal freedom, with the opposite pattern of results. Stimulation and Hedonism values showed no significant relationships with any of the animal attitudes.