This is really interesting, thanks for this! In particular, it was really helpful comparing it to previous less-rigorously designed surveys, as I’m sure you expected pushback using those results. I had a few quite preliminary questions:
Do you think the effects of this could be different for different documentaries, and is this something you would consider testing in the future? Whilst in the paper you state that “Good For Us” uses psychological theory to make the documentary as compelling as possible to shift attitudes and behaviour, it feels quite hard to predict the emotional/attitudinal impact of a documentary. Some random thoughts I had was that maybe more sensationalist documentaries (What the Health, Cowspiracy, Dominion, etc.) could be more effective even though they ignore best practice, and it would be interesting to see how this stacks up against Good For Us. As these are touted as being the most effective/popular pro-animal documentaries, it would be interesting to see how these perform under the same controlled conditions.
Obviously whilst difficult to measure, do you think these documentaries might be important in shaping beliefs that later affect eating behaviour? A common analogy we hear is about “planting a seed” whereby one exposure to pro-animal content might not cause any behaviour change, but it primes them for later exposures which might then have more significant impacts on behaviour change. You talk about repeated exposures briefly in the paper but it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how plausible you think this mechanism is (see point below)
If repeated exposures to pro-animal content might be effective, we still might expect there to be some significant changes in this study as it should be repeated exposure for some people (unless you screened them out) so maybe this point isn’t so strong
Do you think there are other long-term mechanisms that might be at play here e.g. the documentary causes more animal-focused conversations with friends and family, which might cause behaviour change past the 12-day mark? Do you think a follow-up after 2-3 months (for example) would introduce too much noise to have strong causal evidence?
More broadly, what implications do you think this has for the farmed animal movement in terms of funding documentaries vs other interventions, and where do you think more work is needed?
Thank you taking the time to engage, much appreciated! Forgive my responding quickly and feel free to ask for clarification if I miss anything:
Definitely, could be different results with different docs. But ours showed a much stronger effect than the average of similar interventions we found in a previous meta-analysis, suggesting Good for Us is pretty good. It is probably better than Cowspiracy on changing intentions, with longer studies of excerpts of Cowspiracy also finding no effect.
Agree especially with your sub-point. We also tried to recruit populations more likely to be effected in Study 3. Also, see sources in my previous point.
Maybe but doesn’t seem likely since there wasn’t change in importance of animal welfare or other measures of attitudes. I would generally expect effects to decay over time rather than get stronger; our meta-analysis (weakly) supports this hypothesis in that longer time points showed smaller effects. Usefulness of a 2-3 month time point would mostly depend on attrition in my opinion.
I would vote other interventions. Classroom education in colleges and universities seems good as does increasing the availability of plant-based options in food service and restaurants.
This is really interesting, thanks for this! In particular, it was really helpful comparing it to previous less-rigorously designed surveys, as I’m sure you expected pushback using those results. I had a few quite preliminary questions:
Do you think the effects of this could be different for different documentaries, and is this something you would consider testing in the future? Whilst in the paper you state that “Good For Us” uses psychological theory to make the documentary as compelling as possible to shift attitudes and behaviour, it feels quite hard to predict the emotional/attitudinal impact of a documentary. Some random thoughts I had was that maybe more sensationalist documentaries (What the Health, Cowspiracy, Dominion, etc.) could be more effective even though they ignore best practice, and it would be interesting to see how this stacks up against Good For Us. As these are touted as being the most effective/popular pro-animal documentaries, it would be interesting to see how these perform under the same controlled conditions.
Obviously whilst difficult to measure, do you think these documentaries might be important in shaping beliefs that later affect eating behaviour? A common analogy we hear is about “planting a seed” whereby one exposure to pro-animal content might not cause any behaviour change, but it primes them for later exposures which might then have more significant impacts on behaviour change. You talk about repeated exposures briefly in the paper but it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how plausible you think this mechanism is (see point below)
If repeated exposures to pro-animal content might be effective, we still might expect there to be some significant changes in this study as it should be repeated exposure for some people (unless you screened them out) so maybe this point isn’t so strong
Do you think there are other long-term mechanisms that might be at play here e.g. the documentary causes more animal-focused conversations with friends and family, which might cause behaviour change past the 12-day mark? Do you think a follow-up after 2-3 months (for example) would introduce too much noise to have strong causal evidence?
More broadly, what implications do you think this has for the farmed animal movement in terms of funding documentaries vs other interventions, and where do you think more work is needed?
Thank you taking the time to engage, much appreciated! Forgive my responding quickly and feel free to ask for clarification if I miss anything:
Definitely, could be different results with different docs. But ours showed a much stronger effect than the average of similar interventions we found in a previous meta-analysis, suggesting Good for Us is pretty good. It is probably better than Cowspiracy on changing intentions, with longer studies of excerpts of Cowspiracy also finding no effect.
Agree especially with your sub-point. We also tried to recruit populations more likely to be effected in Study 3. Also, see sources in my previous point.
Maybe but doesn’t seem likely since there wasn’t change in importance of animal welfare or other measures of attitudes. I would generally expect effects to decay over time rather than get stronger; our meta-analysis (weakly) supports this hypothesis in that longer time points showed smaller effects. Usefulness of a 2-3 month time point would mostly depend on attrition in my opinion.
I would vote other interventions. Classroom education in colleges and universities seems good as does increasing the availability of plant-based options in food service and restaurants.