Thank you for bringing attention to this phenomenon! I’ve seen a number of polls like this now, which makes me confident that this isn’t a fluke, and actually points to something extremely important for the movement. Another cool study from Psychology Today shows animal rights was the least controversial of six causes considered, including sustainability.
It’s a shame that in my experience, many activist are convinced that broader society doesn’t care about animals at all. I think this is a major sort of disillusionment and burnout in the movement. According to polls like this, there’s an important way in which this mindset is misguided.
I’ve also thought a bit about why we haven’t already abolished factory farms given polls like these. Adding on to the points you’ve already brought up:
Cass Sunstein has done some awesome work on how “societal beliefs” can be slow to change in response to changes in the beliefs of the individual in that society (I like this 80K podcast episode on it). This is a reason for optimism that we may see abrupt change in favor of animal rights in the future.
I think many people don’t actually have “beliefs” about whether animals have rights / feel pain / are conscious, etc . Beliefs are an abstraction over ways they might act in various scenarios (the map is not the territory). People can answer polls like this yet still not have the ascribed belief, because in reality their answer is a different type of behavior (e.g. an emotional response, signaling of group identity, etc). For me, this makes it less paradoxical how people can answer polls like this, yet still eat meat.
Thank you for bringing attention to this phenomenon! I’ve seen a number of polls like this now, which makes me confident that this isn’t a fluke, and actually points to something extremely important for the movement. Another cool study from Psychology Today shows animal rights was the least controversial of six causes considered, including sustainability.
It’s a shame that in my experience, many activist are convinced that broader society doesn’t care about animals at all. I think this is a major sort of disillusionment and burnout in the movement. According to polls like this, there’s an important way in which this mindset is misguided.
I’ve also thought a bit about why we haven’t already abolished factory farms given polls like these. Adding on to the points you’ve already brought up:
Cass Sunstein has done some awesome work on how “societal beliefs” can be slow to change in response to changes in the beliefs of the individual in that society (I like this 80K podcast episode on it). This is a reason for optimism that we may see abrupt change in favor of animal rights in the future.
I think many people don’t actually have “beliefs” about whether animals have rights / feel pain / are conscious, etc . Beliefs are an abstraction over ways they might act in various scenarios (the map is not the territory). People can answer polls like this yet still not have the ascribed belief, because in reality their answer is a different type of behavior (e.g. an emotional response, signaling of group identity, etc). For me, this makes it less paradoxical how people can answer polls like this, yet still eat meat.