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Do Documentaries work

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Taken from a 2023 EA forum post:

A Sep 2021 study on the effectiveness of documentaries at reducing animal consumption found a documentary “did not decrease meat and animal product [consumption 1 week after] compared to the control video when potential social desirability bias was minimized.”. Whilst the study is commendable for its design to minimise social desirability bias (saying what you think the researchers want to hear), the chosen documentary itself was not representative of the sort of documentaries that gain mass viewership and discussion. It is 21 mins long (approximately 7 for health, 4 for environmental, 10 for animals). It hits all the major points (except fish catching and farming) and has an acceptable production quality. However, it’s not of the same length or quality as popular Netflix documentaries, Dominion, Earthlings and Milked, which use music, visuals, interviews, narration and an engaging story to guide the audience through a journey.

As if by magic however, during the 14 months it took to write this piece, a study was published to answer how effective Cowspiracy is. Like with the previous study, viewers of the test-condition documentary did increase the percentage of participants who intended to reduce animal consumption. However, unlike the previous study, the sample size was small, and no mention is made of controlling for social desirability bias.

This brings us on to the thorny issue around measuring: ultimately, advocates care about reducing animal consumption (to zero), but this is difficult to measure accurately and over long enough timescales. However, if we also care about the spread in the ideas of veganism, since a spread in ideas can affect substantial change without affecting an individual’s behaviour (Social Change Dynamics), then results such as the above are sufficient evidence to demonstrate that something of value is happening via this medium.

Perhaps documentaries are more suited to be a hits-based approach than measuring-based; this seems to be the conclusion of an Open Phil Animal Welfare Research Note from Feb 2020. It also concludes that the production value of a documentary correlates with its success, especially with regards to making it onto major streaming platforms, though not necessarily successful enough to offset the increased (and varying) costs.

There is another, advantageous and often overlooked, aspect of documentary impact which could be cheaper to support: promotion. At its end, the newsletter says:

“Documentarians tend to understandably focus on financing the film’s production, leaving few resources to promote it. Funders and activists focused on promotion have two advantages: (a) they can see whether the film turned out well before getting involve, and (b) they can focus exclusively on amplifying the film’s impact.”

It uses Eating Animals as an example; I would have reached for Gary Yourofsky’s famous speech, and its promotion campaign within Israel. Astonishingly, this was overlooked by Bollard when asked about the explosion of interest in veganism in Israel. The popularity of Gary’s speech in Israel at the time is well-documented and the campaign itself was simply two people who translated and shared the video on social media. Promotion campaigns are within the remit of EA (the promotion of What We Owe The Future) and are still useful for animal advocacy (the promotion of This is Vegan Propaganda by Ed Winters).

This oversight highlights the importance of remembering that the cultural downstream effects of documentaries are numerous and not (yet, or easily) captured by the above discussions: people involved in the documentaries get interviewed, news articles get written about the issue, excerpts can be clipped and remixed into easily shareable content online, new activists are created, and existing activists have easily accessible content to point interested people towards. A legacy (2014) report based on a large-scale (N=3000) survey said “Exposure to documentaries and books are two of the biggest catalysts inspiring people to reduce or eliminate animal product consumption.”. A 2020 Faunalytics study of the origins of animal activists in the U.S.A. and Canada (N=161) found that 37% became involved because of exposure to media (13% documentaries, 10% books).

It’s also worth remembering that documentaries are not the only form of media. Things like public advertising (billboards, social media content/ads3), short films,4 books, paintings, poetry, street-art, etc. also have a cultural impact. Of course their impact is hard to measure, but it’s probably doable - I’m confident that somewhere in McDonald’s, someone’s estimated how many times someone needs to see an ad for a McPlant before buying one. Perhaps as with documentaries, it’s not the production of such content, but amplifying its reach which would be an effective action to take. One potentially useful idea would be to improve the inconsistent enforcement of advertising standards in a given country, which seems to scrutinise plant-based and vegan advertising far more than carnist ones.