Social science research we’d like to see on animal welfare [Open Philanthropy]
Context and objectives
This is a list of social science research topics related to animal welfare, developed by researchers on the Open Phil farm animal welfare team.
We compiled this list because people often ask us for suggestions on topics that would be valuable to research. The primary audience for this document is students (undergrad, grad, high school) and researchers without significant budgets (since the topics we list here could potentially be answered using primarily desktop research).[1]
Additional context:
We are not offering to fund research on these topics, and we are not necessarily offering to review or advise research on these topics.
In the interest of brevity, we have not provided much context for each topic. But if you are a PhD student or academic, we may be able to provide you with more detail on our motivation and our interpretation of the current literature: please email Martin Gould with your questions.
The topics covered in this document are the ones we find most interesting; for other animal advocacy topic lists see here. Note that we do not attempt to cover animal welfare science in these topics, and that the topics are listed in no particular order (i.e. we don’t place a higher priority on the topics listed first).
In some areas, we are not fully up to date on the existing literature, so some of our questions may have been answered by research already conducted.
We think it is generally valuable to use back-of-the-envelope-calculations to explore ideas and findings.
If you complete research on these topics, please feel free to share it with us (email below) and with the broader animal advocacy movement (one option is to post here). We’re happy to see published findings, working papers, and even detailed notes that you don’t intend to formally publish.
If you have anything to share or any feedback, please email Martin Gould. This post is also on the Open Phil blog here.
Topics
Corporate commitments
By how many years do animal welfare corporate commitments speed up reforms that might eventually happen anyway due to factors like government policy, individual consumer choices, or broad moral change?
How does this differ by the type of reform? (For example, cage-free vs. Better Chicken Commitment?)
How does this differ by country or geographical region (For example, the EU vs. Brazil?)
What are the production costs associated with specific animal welfare reforms? Here is an example of such an analysis for the European Chicken Commitment.
Policy reform
What are the jurisdictions most amenable to FAW policy reform over the next 5-10 years? What specific reform(s) are most tractable, and why?
To what extent is animal welfare an issue that is politically polarizing (i.e. clearly associated with a particular political affiliation)? Is this a barrier to reform? If so, how might political polarization of animal welfare be reduced?
How do corporate campaigns and policy reform interact with and potentially reinforce each other?
What conclusions should be drawn about the optimal timing of policy reform campaigns?
What would be the cost-effectiveness of a global animal welfare benchmarking project? (That is, comparing farm animal welfare by country and by company, as a basis to drive competition, as with similar models in human rights and global development.)
Which international institutions (e.g. World Bank, WTO, IMF, World Organisation for Animal Health, UN agencies) have the most influence over animal welfare policy in emerging economies? What are the most promising ways to influence these institutions?
Does this vary by geographical region (for example, Asia vs. Latin America)?
Alt protein
What % of PBMA (plant-based meat alternative) units/meals sold displace a unit/meal of meat?
Is the displacement rate different across PBMA products? More specifically, does it differ between ‘next gen’ products like Beyond and Impossible vs. other PBMA products?
What types of meat are PBMA products displacing? For example, what’s the breakdown between beef, chicken, and fish? 2. What other foods are PBMA products displacing? (For example, what fraction of PBMA units/meals are replacing tofu rather than replacing chicken.)
How will displacement rates change if PBMA products improve? 3. What are the product qualities that are most important in driving this?
What share of the global meat market will PBMA and/or cultured meat products account for in 10, 30, or 50 years?
What is the impact on sales of labeling laws that restrict the terms that can be used to describe/sell PBMAs and other plant-based products?
Are there clear ways in which non-PBMA plant-based products could be improved to increase uptake and displace meat consumption?
What government alt protein R&D is most impactful and tractable to advocate for?
How can alt protein be supported most effectively by government policy (outside of government R&D)?
Dietary/mindset change
What are the rates of vegetarianism and veganism (collectively “veg*nism”) in populous countries (e.g. US, China, India, EU countries)? How have these changed, if at all, over recent decades?
What percentage of people will be veg*n in 20, 50, or 100 years?
Which settings are most conducive to running rigorous experiments on dietary change interventions, and how can these settings be accessed/used? (For example, college cafeterias allow data on purchases to be used, so that researchers don’t have to rely on self-reports.)
What is the cost-effectiveness of online advertising to reduce meat consumption and/or to bring new advocates into the animal welfare movement?
What about the cost-effectiveness of documentaries or other forms of mass media?
What is the impact of meat advertising bans such as this one?
Has the success of animal advocates on social media changed over time (based on standard social media metrics and possibly other metrics)? If so, why might this be the case?
How impactful would it be to get more animal welfare content into TV shows and/or movies? If this seems promising, what are the best ways to achieve it?
How impactful would it be to get already sympathetic celebrities to speak up more on animal welfare? If this seems promising, what are the best ways to achieve it?
Movement building
The FAW movement has generally gotten less traction in low- and middle-income countries than it has in high-income countries. Should we expect this to change as emerging economies become richer, and over what timeframe?
How strong is the relationship between country-level per capita income/wealth and FAW reform tractability?
How does an increase in the number of advocates in a given geography increase (or otherwise impact) the likelihood of finding cost-effective interventions in that geography?
Other interventions
The UN estimates that 17% of food is wasted. Are there any cost-effective ways to help animals by reducing animal product food waste?
In the retail sector, how have the availability and sales of shrimp products changed over time? When retailers and food service companies drop shrimp products from their assortment, what are the most common reasons (e.g. mangrove destruction concerns)?
Are there datasets which don’t exist (and could be funded by philanthropy or others) that would increase the effectiveness of the animal welfare movement?
What are effective ways to reach more thought leaders, policymakers, and other elites, and influence their views on animal welfare?
Where is the use of broiler cages increasing, and how prevalent are they in those areas? Are there any tractable interventions that could undermine those trends?
What are the most tractable and cost-effective interventions to improve wild animal welfare?
Other questions
The Welfare Footprint Project has four ‘categories of pain intensity’, and it estimates the time spent in each category of pain given different farming systems (e.g.). How might these categories be weighted to arrive at an overall welfare score?
The Welfare Footprint Project ruled some aspects of welfare out of scope, given a lack of academic literature on how they could be quantified (e.g. lack of control, fearfulness).[2] How could these be incorporated quantitatively into a judgment on the welfare of animals in different farming systems?
Funding for farm animal welfare advocacy organizations has increased in recent years (even excluding Open Philanthropy funding) – why?
On balance, do wild animals have lives that are net positive or net negative?
To make this more tractable, consider one species of animal in a single geography.
Footnotes
- ^
We plan to share a list of topics suited to primary empirical social science at a later date
- ^
See Chapter 9 in “Quantifying pain in laying hens”, under the heading ‘Important Considerations’ from page 11 of the Chapter 9 PDF
Thanks for sharing, Martin and Emma! I think posts like yours are great because they help people get a better sense of which questions are decision-relevant for funders. I would very much welcome similar posts from Open Phil highlighting questions in other areas.
Very nice! Apropos of:
I’d suggest retirement communities. We have a fair bit of data on changing the eating habits of college students (I review the most rigorous studies in that literature in this meta-analysis), but much less on adults, and essentially nothing on older people. Like college cafeterias, retirement communities offer a lot of opportunities for oblique monitoring, as well as a bevy of potential qualitative outcomes (e.g. staff members who know that ‘Daisy always orders the chicken’ might observe that she finishes less of her meat after watching the movie ‘Babe’). My advisor suggested this empirical strategy a few weeks ago and I think it’s on the money.
As it happens, my coauthor and I suggest some studies we’d like to see in section 6.4 of that meta-analysis, and I’m working now and getting some of these off the ground. I’d be glad to hear any feedback you might have.
I love that you are doing this!
I think a broader title might be more helpful, though—many of the questions you list are not really social science questions, but, for example, about consumer psychology (a behavioral science) or techno-economics (e.g. the alt protein R&D return questions).
I.e. there is a broader set of people who might help answer these questions, many of which would not understand themselves as social scientists.
I’d consider psychology and economics in general to be social sciences, and that would include consumer psychology and at least parts of techno-economics.
However, almost all of the questions in Other questions are definitely not social science questions, and instead animal behaviour/ethology, animal cognition, zoology more generally, ecology and philosophy, although some approaches in common with social sciences might be useful.
Also “What are the most tractable and cost-effective interventions to improve wild animal welfare?” seems more like a generalist and/or interdisciplinary research question, although it could involve some social science.
We agree on economics, it’s more that techno-economic analysis is quite different (just had someone on my team do techno-economic work that would be relevant to this list, but she is maximally far from a social scientist in skillset and self-identification).
I think for some parts of social psychology it might be considered a social science, though in general most social scientists would say the definition of social science is something like “the dependent variable are societal-level phenomena” by which economics, political science, sociology etc. are social sciences, but psychology is clearly not (and in most universities, psychology would not be in the social sciences department).
But I think we agree on the broader point that the current title is a bit of a misnomer.
Social sciences are concerned with much more than societal level phenomena. Relationships and interactions between people count, too.
FWIW, my experience in Canada has been that psychology is typically part of the faculty of social sciences (or a combined one with humanities and/or arts).
Thanks for putting together this excellent list, Martin and Emma. This is just in time for my lab’s upcoming brainstorming session on future research priorities.
Thanks, this is relevant for researchers and people funding research and prioritizing/evaluating it. This includes Unjournal.org; we are looking to prioritize the evaluation of research relevant to animal welfare, and we have built/are building a ‘field specialist’ team focusing on this.
Some expansion on the theory of change/paths to impact/logic model for some of the leading cases could be particularly helpful. (You mention we should reach out to Martin Gould on this—I plan to do so.)
While some of these might be amenable to simpler ‘desk research’ (literature reviews, simple BOTECs, coalescing information), I think many of the more interesting ones could require some heavier lifting in terms of research depth and methodological expertise. I’m not saying the ’80% of the 80⁄20 research’ would not necessarily have value here, but it is my sense is that more in=depth rigorous work may be warranted, and potentially worth funding.
For example:
This is a challenging causal inference question; while case studies and ‘plausible inference’ from qualitative approaches could have value. It could also potentially be addressed quantitatively with methods like difference-in-differences, synthetic panels, and natural experiments. This might also require some expertise in dynamic/time-series models. It seems high-value, given that funding corporate campaigns have been claimed to be among the highest-impact animal welfare opportunities.
I guess the ToC here is that this informs the priority one should give to interventions to improve farmed-animal welfare conditions … because ’if most people are vegan anyways, it matters less. Or perhaps this is about the cost side of increasing global prosperity (meat-eaters dilemma) or supporting pro vs anti-natal policies?
I suspect predicting this out 100 years will be extremely difficult, in the sense that quantitative models and expertise might have little value. But for 10 or 20 years out, I think social science modeling expertise could be meaningful.
But some of the other questions seem more straightforwardly amenable to quantitative social science work, including careful and feasible RCTs, and sometimes non-RCT causal inference methods, and Bayesian statistical inference and presentation. E.g.,
Looking at simple before/after comparisons, or aggregating casual media reporting on this could be misleading. An RCT here seems feasible.
This seems like something mainstream academic/professional economists might consider or already be considering, perhaps in conjunction with legislative testimony or court cases. It seems amenable to formal empirical analysis, perhaps in the ‘empirical industrial organization/quantitative marketing’ literatures. But it is by no means simple… to estimate impact on quantities sold, considering competitive price responses, responses of substitute products, time trends and seasonality, etc.