We should also note that Norwood (one of the authors who replicated SI’s original 2017 study) this year ran a new slaughterhouse ban survey experiment ([Britton & Norwood 2022](https://doi.org/10.1017/aae.2022.17)) and found lower support. (I only just received the data from them so I couldn’t include it in the post).
Here is my summary from just skimming the article and quickly aggregating the data.
They test a hypothesis that the question ordering in the 2017 SI study cued respondents’ ideal self (like whether voting is a moral virtue) rather than their common self (like whether they actually voted). Their theory is that by asking respondents first whether they agreed with statements about meat reduction, discomfort with the way animals are used in the food industry, and animal sentience it cued their ideal self so that “the desire to not appear hypocritical induced them to activate a mixture of their ideal and common self” when answering questions about bans on animal farming, factory farming, and slaughterhouses.
The actual design of their study is a little too complicated to explain here (involving four treatments that altered the order and wording of ideal and common self questions, some food-related and some non-food related, as well as inserting buffer questions), but basically some respondents saw the ban questions before the ideal self questions, and others saw them in the same order as in the original 2017 SI study. Furthermore, to build on their tests about whether respondents understood the implications of bans, “roughly half of the subjects are given the [common self] statements exactly as they appeared on the Animal Sentience survey, while the other half contain an addition [. . .] For example, some see the statement “I support a ban on slaughterhouses” while others see the statement “I support a ban on slaughterhouses and will stop eating meat”. ”
While the primary aim of their study was to test something they call “identity inertia” and they fail to find convincing evidence of it, their finding on the slaughterhouse ban issue was “once individuals are informed about the implications of actions like banning slaughterhouses, they are less eager to do so.”
Data were collected via an online survey through Qualtrics from August to October 2019 of a representative sample of nearly 2600 drawn from the U.S. population. A subset of the results (N=1528) show
26.48% “agreed” with the statement “I support a ban on slaughterhouses” (36.5% disagreed, 37.02% no opinion) (N=759)
18.21% “Agreed” with the statement “I support a ban on slaughterhouses and will stop eating meat.” (58.13% disagreed, 23.67% no opinion (N=769)
(Though Norwood say they couldn’t confirm this was correct since they never went into the data to get raw numbers like that, and I couldn’t see an easy way to break these results down according to whether respondents saw the ideal-self or common-self questions first- though that probably doesn’t matter since Norwood didn’t find a lot of evidence that it matters)
We should also note that Norwood (one of the authors who replicated SI’s original 2017 study) this year ran a new slaughterhouse ban survey experiment ([Britton & Norwood 2022](https://doi.org/10.1017/aae.2022.17)) and found lower support. (I only just received the data from them so I couldn’t include it in the post).
Here is my summary from just skimming the article and quickly aggregating the data.
They test a hypothesis that the question ordering in the 2017 SI study cued respondents’ ideal self (like whether voting is a moral virtue) rather than their common self (like whether they actually voted). Their theory is that by asking respondents first whether they agreed with statements about meat reduction, discomfort with the way animals are used in the food industry, and animal sentience it cued their ideal self so that “the desire to not appear hypocritical induced them to activate a mixture of their ideal and common self” when answering questions about bans on animal farming, factory farming, and slaughterhouses.
The actual design of their study is a little too complicated to explain here (involving four treatments that altered the order and wording of ideal and common self questions, some food-related and some non-food related, as well as inserting buffer questions), but basically some respondents saw the ban questions before the ideal self questions, and others saw them in the same order as in the original 2017 SI study. Furthermore, to build on their tests about whether respondents understood the implications of bans, “roughly half of the subjects are given the [common self] statements exactly as they appeared on the Animal Sentience survey, while the other half contain an addition [. . .] For example, some see the statement “I support a ban on slaughterhouses” while others see the statement “I support a ban on slaughterhouses and will stop eating meat”. ”
While the primary aim of their study was to test something they call “identity inertia” and they fail to find convincing evidence of it, their finding on the slaughterhouse ban issue was “once individuals are informed about the implications of actions like banning slaughterhouses, they are less eager to do so.”
Data were collected via an online survey through Qualtrics from August to October 2019 of a representative sample of nearly 2600 drawn from the U.S. population. A subset of the results (N=1528) show
26.48% “agreed” with the statement “I support a ban on slaughterhouses” (36.5% disagreed, 37.02% no opinion) (N=759)
18.21% “Agreed” with the statement “I support a ban on slaughterhouses and will stop eating meat.” (58.13% disagreed, 23.67% no opinion (N=769)
(Though Norwood say they couldn’t confirm this was correct since they never went into the data to get raw numbers like that, and I couldn’t see an easy way to break these results down according to whether respondents saw the ideal-self or common-self questions first- though that probably doesn’t matter since Norwood didn’t find a lot of evidence that it matters)