Thanks for doing this work Neil (and the great RP survey team) - it’s super interesting and helpful as useful! I’m particularly quite interested in this idea you had in your conclusion:
It would be better to test people’s responses to more detailed messages and policy proposals, paying special attention to how radical messages compare to counterfactual moderate messages. One could also test a radical ask (ban factory farming) and a moderate ask (labelling for cage-free eggs, say) each with a radical message (“meat is murder”) versus a moderate one (“human/consumer welfare”).
Is RP planning on doing anything in this vein? I know of one experimental paper released quite recently that tested this for both different radical messages, and also radical tactics (in a 2x2 design). They found that radical messages (ending all animal use vs improve animal welfare) didn’t increase support for more moderate messages, but the use of radical tactics did. The author isn’t an animal person (I’m fairly sure) so the different conditions were quite broad—which you can see in the supplemental files of the paper. For example, the radical agenda spoke about ‘eliminating the human consumption of meat and creating a “vegan world”’ whereas the moderate treatment focused on ‘increasing the number of farms using humane methods’ which is fairly coarse-grained!
Would be interesting to try replicate this experiment with more specific policy proposals as you mention, as it will probably yield more realistic results.
Thanks for doing this work Neil (and the great RP survey team) - it’s super interesting and helpful as useful! I’m particularly quite interested in this idea you had in your conclusion:
Is RP planning on doing anything in this vein? I know of one experimental paper released quite recently that tested this for both different radical messages, and also radical tactics (in a 2x2 design). They found that radical messages (ending all animal use vs improve animal welfare) didn’t increase support for more moderate messages, but the use of radical tactics did. The author isn’t an animal person (I’m fairly sure) so the different conditions were quite broad—which you can see in the supplemental files of the paper. For example, the radical agenda spoke about ‘eliminating the human consumption of meat and creating a “vegan world”’ whereas the moderate treatment focused on ‘increasing the number of farms using humane methods’ which is fairly coarse-grained!
Would be interesting to try replicate this experiment with more specific policy proposals as you mention, as it will probably yield more realistic results.