I agree. It strongly depends on the framing of questions. For example, I asked people how strongly they value animal welfare compared to human welfare. Average: 70%. So in one interpretation, that means 1 chicken = 0.7 humans. But there is a huge difference between saving and not harming, and between ‘animal’ and ‘chicken’. Asking people how many bird or human lives to save, gives a very different answer than asking them how many birds or humans to harm. People could say that saving 1 human is the equivalent of saving a million birds, but that harming one human is the equivalent of harming only a few birds. And when they realize the bird is a chicken used for food, people get stuck and their answers go weird. Or ask people about their maximum willingness to pay to avoid an hour of human or chicken suffering, versus their minimum willingness to accept to add an hour of suffering: huge differences. (I conducted some unpublished surveys about this, and one published: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21606544.2022.2138980.) In short: in this area you can easily show that people give highly inconsistent answers depending on the formulations of the questions.
I agree. It strongly depends on the framing of questions. For example, I asked people how strongly they value animal welfare compared to human welfare. Average: 70%. So in one interpretation, that means 1 chicken = 0.7 humans. But there is a huge difference between saving and not harming, and between ‘animal’ and ‘chicken’. Asking people how many bird or human lives to save, gives a very different answer than asking them how many birds or humans to harm. People could say that saving 1 human is the equivalent of saving a million birds, but that harming one human is the equivalent of harming only a few birds. And when they realize the bird is a chicken used for food, people get stuck and their answers go weird. Or ask people about their maximum willingness to pay to avoid an hour of human or chicken suffering, versus their minimum willingness to accept to add an hour of suffering: huge differences. (I conducted some unpublished surveys about this, and one published: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21606544.2022.2138980.) In short: in this area you can easily show that people give highly inconsistent answers depending on the formulations of the questions.