How do you engage with the animal welfare advocacy groups who might act on your research? Or alternatively, how do you counteract any negatives from not being an advocacy organization, and not getting feedback directly (e.g. advocacy that responds to research because they are done in conjunction)?
When I worked in animal advocacy, my sense was that the research that EA research groups like ACE were doing was either irrelevant or badly ill-informed / inaccurate, primarily because the researchers didn’t actually have much experience in the space. Or, it came only after the advocacy groups had already basically realized the same things, and shifted priorities. I don’t think this has really been relevant for the work you’ve done so far, since it hasn’t been particularly proscriptve on particular strategies, but it seems like a greater risk as you do more farmed animal research. I’ve always been disappointed that the in-house research teams at animal groups are small, since they seem better positioned to do some of this work (though there are probably downsides to that too).
Edit for clarification: As an example, a lot of studies were done on pro-vegan leaflets. Many studies seemed to be badly designed, etc, so that was too bad. But organizations did leafleting for a while, realized there were more effective uses of resources, and then stopped leafleting (generally—obviously some still happens, especially to cultivate volunteers). It was only after this that evidence that leafleting was not very effective emerged in the research literature. While I’m glad that a post-mortem happened, it really didn’t make a difference in charity behavior, since charities had changed direction already for the most part.
The question is really just motivated by a thought experiment—if I could, instead of having all the money that’s been spent on EA animal advocacy research historically, have that money go to direct advocacy (maybe corporate campaigns, for example), would I? And for me the answer is almost certainly yes, with maybe one or two exceptions.
Relatedly, on wild animal welfare, I feel very confident that if we could eliminate basically all research that happened before ~3 months ago in exchange for the information we have now about how to approach academic field building, it be worthwhile (recognizing that a big chunk of that research is stuff I spent time on).
So both these suggest to me that I should generally have a prior favoring direct advocacy (or at least, really promising direct advocacy) over EA research moving forward, as much as that goes against my own inclinations or desires (I like research more). Or at least, a positive case has to be made for research. And, it suggests to me, given that almost all this research has been done by groups not doing advocacy (with exceptions), that research should primarily be done by groups doing advocacy. Though as a note, obviously a lot of academic field building advocacy on wild animal welfare issues can be done by publishing research within the conservation space, etc
But organizations did leafleting for a while, realized there were more effective uses of resources, and then stopped leafleting [...] It was only after that that evidence that leafleting was not very effective emerged in the research literature.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that it’s accidental that things happened in this order. If the same research about leafleting was done earlier, it could’ve had an impact by making organizations deprioritize leafleting earlier. I don’t think that we can trust organizations always to realize what is a more effective use of their resources without any research. There are too many biases in human nature, and it’s often just not obvious enough.
I also feel that so far, animal welfare research didn’t have that much impact. And I do feel more skeptical about it because of it. However, I’m not sure there was enough animal advocacy research to conclude that we should deprioritize it. Research is a hit-based endeavor. Just because we (EAA researchers) haven’t had many hits in our very short history, doesn’t mean that they will never happen. Note that it’s also possible that some of the research we already did will become a hit and make an impact in the future (e.g., our work on invertebrate sentience or fish stocking).
The situation in animal advocacy seems to be that we have very many options about what to do, and we don’t know which options are the best. That does sound like a situation that could be improved by research.
How do you engage with the animal welfare advocacy groups who might act on your research?
We talk to them, try to understand what they do and why, ask what research they would find useful, and ask whether our research has influenced their decisions (we did it via a survey and informally).
Or alternatively, how do you counteract any negatives from not being an advocacy organization, and not getting feedback directly (e.g. advocacy that responds to research because they are done in conjunction)?
What do you think are the main relevant differences between the team being in-house versus a separate organization? The way I see it, all of us in the EAA movement are a part of the same team, working towards the same goals. A president of an animal charity can go to us and ask us to research a particular topic in a similar way they could go to their in-house research team. I guess one difference is that if they go to us, it’s up to us to decide whether to pursue the suggested topic but I don’t see why that would necessarily be worse.[1] Of course, I’m unsure about this as I’ve never worked for an in-house team.
So far, I haven’t pursued any of the research topics that were suggested by people from animal charities because they didn’t seem very tractable. However, I will probably try to make progress on some of these topics in the future.
I guess my inclination toward in-house teams would be that an organization would be more likely to respond / change direction on the basis of findings from in-house teams. But I’m unsure that there is much evidence that organizations have changed directions from research done by anyone, except perhaps in small ways. I also imagine being in-house would reduce barriers for data collection, etc., because there wouldn’t be NDAs or privacy concerns that might govern inter-org interactions. I think you and I had previously had this issue, where I had done research that might have been relevant to your work, and couldn’t share it due to an NDA.
How do you engage with the animal welfare advocacy groups who might act on your research? Or alternatively, how do you counteract any negatives from not being an advocacy organization, and not getting feedback directly (e.g. advocacy that responds to research because they are done in conjunction)?
When I worked in animal advocacy, my sense was that the research that EA research groups like ACE were doing was either irrelevant or badly ill-informed / inaccurate, primarily because the researchers didn’t actually have much experience in the space. Or, it came only after the advocacy groups had already basically realized the same things, and shifted priorities. I don’t think this has really been relevant for the work you’ve done so far, since it hasn’t been particularly proscriptve on particular strategies, but it seems like a greater risk as you do more farmed animal research. I’ve always been disappointed that the in-house research teams at animal groups are small, since they seem better positioned to do some of this work (though there are probably downsides to that too).
Edit for clarification: As an example, a lot of studies were done on pro-vegan leaflets. Many studies seemed to be badly designed, etc, so that was too bad. But organizations did leafleting for a while, realized there were more effective uses of resources, and then stopped leafleting (generally—obviously some still happens, especially to cultivate volunteers). It was only after this that evidence that leafleting was not very effective emerged in the research literature. While I’m glad that a post-mortem happened, it really didn’t make a difference in charity behavior, since charities had changed direction already for the most part.
The question is really just motivated by a thought experiment—if I could, instead of having all the money that’s been spent on EA animal advocacy research historically, have that money go to direct advocacy (maybe corporate campaigns, for example), would I? And for me the answer is almost certainly yes, with maybe one or two exceptions.
Relatedly, on wild animal welfare, I feel very confident that if we could eliminate basically all research that happened before ~3 months ago in exchange for the information we have now about how to approach academic field building, it be worthwhile (recognizing that a big chunk of that research is stuff I spent time on).
So both these suggest to me that I should generally have a prior favoring direct advocacy (or at least, really promising direct advocacy) over EA research moving forward, as much as that goes against my own inclinations or desires (I like research more). Or at least, a positive case has to be made for research. And, it suggests to me, given that almost all this research has been done by groups not doing advocacy (with exceptions), that research should primarily be done by groups doing advocacy. Though as a note, obviously a lot of academic field building advocacy on wild animal welfare issues can be done by publishing research within the conservation space, etc
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that it’s accidental that things happened in this order. If the same research about leafleting was done earlier, it could’ve had an impact by making organizations deprioritize leafleting earlier. I don’t think that we can trust organizations always to realize what is a more effective use of their resources without any research. There are too many biases in human nature, and it’s often just not obvious enough.
I also feel that so far, animal welfare research didn’t have that much impact. And I do feel more skeptical about it because of it. However, I’m not sure there was enough animal advocacy research to conclude that we should deprioritize it. Research is a hit-based endeavor. Just because we (EAA researchers) haven’t had many hits in our very short history, doesn’t mean that they will never happen. Note that it’s also possible that some of the research we already did will become a hit and make an impact in the future (e.g., our work on invertebrate sentience or fish stocking).
The situation in animal advocacy seems to be that we have very many options about what to do, and we don’t know which options are the best. That does sound like a situation that could be improved by research.
We talk to them, try to understand what they do and why, ask what research they would find useful, and ask whether our research has influenced their decisions (we did it via a survey and informally).
What do you think are the main relevant differences between the team being in-house versus a separate organization? The way I see it, all of us in the EAA movement are a part of the same team, working towards the same goals. A president of an animal charity can go to us and ask us to research a particular topic in a similar way they could go to their in-house research team. I guess one difference is that if they go to us, it’s up to us to decide whether to pursue the suggested topic but I don’t see why that would necessarily be worse.[1] Of course, I’m unsure about this as I’ve never worked for an in-house team.
So far, I haven’t pursued any of the research topics that were suggested by people from animal charities because they didn’t seem very tractable. However, I will probably try to make progress on some of these topics in the future.
I guess my inclination toward in-house teams would be that an organization would be more likely to respond / change direction on the basis of findings from in-house teams. But I’m unsure that there is much evidence that organizations have changed directions from research done by anyone, except perhaps in small ways. I also imagine being in-house would reduce barriers for data collection, etc., because there wouldn’t be NDAs or privacy concerns that might govern inter-org interactions. I think you and I had previously had this issue, where I had done research that might have been relevant to your work, and couldn’t share it due to an NDA.