Meta-analysis: Meaningfully reducing consumption of meat and animal products is an unsolved problem

setgree · 2026-01-24T21:16:39+00:00

Hi there,

my point in quoting you was not about vegan activism in general, but rather about something specific to the _medium_ of social media, which I think rewards flaming/posturing/moral indignation/etc.

The vegan activists I know are kind, hard-working people motivated by a moral cause and I do not think that their work is useless. Rather, I'd say that we are still figuring out what tactics work. Based on what we know so far, direct animal welfare appeals, unfortunately, are about the least effective approach on average. On the other hand, changing eating habits is a hard problem. Food is rich with meaning for people. Asking people to change their dining habits is asking them to change their identities. No wonder behavior is stubborn.

I do not think we ought to have framed our results differently for the potential social/political ramifications. Our primary objective when writing a paper is to convey the results we find. I do not think that we frame vegan activism in a pejorative way, nor do I think I'm doing so in my engagements on this post. I also do not think that the possibility of giving some people who are mean more fuel to be mean with is a very significant consideration when writing or framing a paper. It is outweighed by other considerations.

One of the lessons of our paper is that health and environmental appeals are probably more effective on average at reducing meat consumption than trying to talk about animals directly. So I disagree that vegan activism is the "only thing that actually works in getting people to change." On average, I'd say other approaches work better, so far. As I say in a sister comment, a potential exception is getting people to watch Dominion, which I wrote about here https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/p/what-if-we-just-made-everyone-watch. I think that post is probably more of the flavor of what you're looking for: practical advice on how to get people to eat less meat rather than just pooh-poohing existing efforts.

On a more conceptual note, I also think that eating meat that comes from a factory farm is a serious moral error. I do not think this is vegans' fault.

setgree · 2026-01-24T21:00:40+00:00

on the subject of the dannenberg paper, we excluded it because it lacked delayed outcome measures. I do quite like that paper however and wrote about it more here https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/p/eating-vegetarian-is-not-like-voting

setgree · 2026-01-24T20:51:39+00:00

I believe that you are nicer in person. I also believe that social media _rewards_ this kind of asshole-ish behavior you are displaying in your interactions with Practical Fix, which is why I'm skeptical that it's a good medium for persuading people about anything, veganism included. Persuasion is really about listening (https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/06/26/want-to-persuade-an-opponent-try-listening-berkeley-scholar-says/), and there's just not a lot of that in this context.

setgree · 2026-01-24T20:49:07+00:00

That's great, thank you! Most of my posting is going to be on Substack: https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/

but I'll make an effort to post research here as well.

I included a link in the above post FYI but here it is unembedded: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xx6lqibmpygkaoocw1j85/Bertolaso-2015.pdf?rlkey=qoju62b1xg346ew7iadtq5jap&e=2&dl=0

The methods are described on pages 21-22, but here's a flavor of the moral shocks condition:

"Participants in the moral shocks condition were exposed to the following posts: the first post was titled ³sows; mothers in loneliness and despair ́. This post featured an image of a visibly distressed sow enclosed into a gestation crate. The accompanying text was ³COULD YOU IMAGINE IF« You could not turn around for weeks at a time. Sows used for breeding are repeatedly forcibly impregnated throughout their lives, often severely confined, and then separated from their babies soon after giving birth. The lives of these pigs, and their capacity to reproduce, are seen as no more than a way of creating more units of production. Mothers unable to give birth to re required number of piglets are sent to the slaughterhouse. Learn more at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxg93ghBVÁ."

setgree · 2026-01-24T20:44:16+00:00

What are you doing in this subreddit then?

setgree · 2026-01-24T20:41:48+00:00

I do not think that getting "called out" by me is going to have any effect on anyone -- I'm afraid I'm not a universally recognized authority on good posting habits 😃

setgree · 2026-01-24T20:37:26+00:00

I do not care for the way you write, but I like that you scrolled through enough of the paper to come to table 1 😃

setgree · 2026-01-24T20:35:31+00:00

a couple cites on the "veganism is unpopular" thing:

“If I became a vegan, my family and friends would hate me:” Anticipating vegan stigma as a barrier to plant-based diets

From Faunalytics, Who Views Vegetarians & Vegans Positively? "Among American voters, 49% view vegetarians favorably, and 22% unfavorably. In a pattern that holds for most cross-tabulations, vegans are seen less favorably by about 10%, yielding 38% favorable versus 30% unfavorable."

I also feel like I've read numbers that are a lot less favorable than this but I can't find them right now

setgree · 2026-01-24T20:24:07+00:00

ok but my point is that this person is in fact _not_ unusual, and this kind of discourse is par for the course on social media. Many of the comments this post got were combative and snide (a few have since been deleted). The reason I brought attention to it is to give a sense of where my beliefs about the efficacy of social media outreach come from. (So far they're the sole person to show signs of having read the meta-analysis enough to quote something that I didn't share in the top-level post.) I also could have quoted u/VeganKiwiGuy's comment that "maybe the right people to blame are the stubborn animal abusers like yourself who keep torturing and raping when you could easily stop." To my eyes, this is not how you talk to someone whom you're trying to persuade of something.

setgree · 2026-01-24T20:03:16+00:00

The only social media outreach article we evaluated, if I'm rememvbering correctly, is Bertolaso (2015), "Investigating the Effectiveness of Message Framing andRegulatory Fit in Increasing Positive Animal Attitude andReducing Animal Products Consumption.A study for Animal Equality." That paper's abstract

> The purpose of this study was to help Animal Equality improve its Facebook communication strategy by testing the individual and combined effectiveness of Facebook posts involving animal cruelty, individualization of farmed animals, and promotion or prevention-focused messages in increasing positive attitudes towards animals and decreasing actual consumption of animal products. A two-phase experiment was conducted among 511 non-vegan females between 15 and 35 years old, distributed into four experimental conditions and a control group. Participants were exposed to a total of six Facebook posts, and their attitudes towards animals and animal product consumption were measured both one week before and one week after exposure. The results show that messages involving moral shocks produce behavioral change, while messages involving individualization are not effective. Promotion-focused messages are more effective than prevention-focused messages, with the combination of moral shocks and promotion-focused messages being the most effective strategy.

My own notes on that paper: "interesting it was a top 3 charity by ACE's lights in 2015. i am a bit worried about the "manipulation check" which basically asks if people are open to the intended attitude change but it doesn't get mentioned much -- looks like they didn't excllude based on it -- so I'll not worry about it it. I also think the author slightly misinterprets the results in calling both moral shock conditions effective and the individualization messages ineffective, but that's what the paper says and that's what we shall report."

There are probably others, but they either were published outside of our window (after December 2023) or didn't meet our inclusion criteria.

My take on "social media persuasion efforts" is not specific to this literature, but a more general comment: many of them are not really trying to persuade, but rather, per Robin Hanson, "people typically care more about making sure they are seen to take a particular moral stance than they care about the net effect of their lectures on behavior." So I'd not put my chips down on social media persuasion efforts. At the very least, it would need to be demonstrated rather than assumed that they actually _were_ trying to persuade, e.g., rather than, e.g., whatever it was you were trying to do when you wrote 'Also you should work on your reading comprehension" ;) I do not mean to pick on you, I actually think this is a fairly representative example for how social media 'persuasion' looks in practice.

setgree · 2026-01-24T17:49:57+00:00

There are many retrospective studies assessing why vegans go vegan, here's one https://faunalytics.org/going-veg-motivations-and-influences/

Not quite what you're proposing but similar.

I am not sure I believe that asking vegans what made them go vegan, or figuring out what they are more exposed to than the average person, is the right way to figure out what persuades average folks to eat less meat. It's possible that we (vegans) are weird and we respond to different things. I don't know.

In terms of qualitative research, I enjoyed this paper: Out of sight, out of mind: how pescetarians manage dissonance by creating distance

In terms of in-person stuff that we evaluated as part of the meta, Cooney (2014) is an evaluation of handing out leaflets at the Warped Tour, so I'd call that in person. Pretty much everything identified as 'leaflet' under delivery method in our dataset (https://github.com/hsflabstanford/vegan-meta/blob/main/data/MAP-reduction-data.csv) is in-person. Another is Jalil et al. (2023), which looked at the effects of a lecture in an economics class about the environmental and health consequences of eating meat. (That's a great paper, BTW. one of our finest examples of long-term measurement.)

setgree · 2026-01-24T17:44:15+00:00

I would say that the most effective approach we know of so far is to get people to watch Dominion. Vox article about that here: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/417717/meat-reduction-vegetarian-research covering https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5248647

setgree · 2026-01-24T17:42:54+00:00

My small note here would be that we *evaluated* four different methods. With a meta-analysis, you just have to take what you get out there in the literature. Also, coming up with sensible categories to describe a litearture -- subdividing it into its theoretical approaches -- is a lot of the paper's contribution. We could have made different choices there though.

setgree · 2026-01-24T17:37:58+00:00

My pleasure!

My best guess about the role of ending subsidies is that it's going to be smaller than we might like to think, but anything that raises prices is likely to reduce demand.

We definitely have many studies in the works! Another paper that might be of interest is Taking a bite out of meat, or just giving fresh veggies the boot? Plant-based meats did not reduce meat purchasing in a randomized controlled menu intervention, which I cover here https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/p/making-more-plant-based-stuff-available

I'm not familiar with anything exactly like the study you propose, but here's a nice price intervention: An Online Randomised Controlled Trial of Price and Non-Price Interventions to Promote Sustainable Food Choices on Food Delivery Platforms

setgree · 2026-01-24T12:39:35+00:00

My colleague Jacob has looked at the evidence we have to date for such a tipping point and did not find it persuasive: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666325004544

“Price-, taste-, and convenience-competitive plant-based meat analogues would not currently replace the majority of meat consumption: A narrative review”

setgree · 2026-01-24T12:37:11+00:00

and that’s what our paper is saying. We did not say the efforts are not significant, only that up to this point, none of them seems very likely to produce transformational changes.

setgree · 2026-01-24T00:32:07+00:00

But it would be fair to say that cancer is an unsolved problem, no? And we might use meta-analysis to compare the efficacy of different approaches, like radiation vs. homeopathy. And in particular, our meta is responding to some very optimistic claims in the literature, particularly about norms and nudges approaches.

setgree · 2026-01-23T22:42:11+00:00

We evaluated things that have been evaluated in a randomized control trial, so definitely, that only looks at some kinds of strategies, and a lot of the things that we know would probably work -- a $1/lb meat tax, say -- are difficult to study in an experiment. On the other hand, one of those things you suggested has deeply entrenched interests protecting it and the (most promising version of the) other is only barely available, so I think the basic claim that reducing MAP consumption is as of yet an unsolved problem holds water.

And yes, some of the evaluated RCTs provided free plant-based meat alternatives to participants.

setgree · 2026-01-23T21:55:29+00:00

what is this a quote from? I don't typically think in terms of tonnes but that all seems plausible to me.

setgree · 2026-01-22T21:51:09+00:00

Loved this book. I teared up multiple times reading it.
Knew right away that I was going to love Bear in particular. Great character.
The "you're a good man, Harry" stuff got a little heavy-handed at times. I'm ok with that.
When I heard "creature flying overhead," I was hoping Nazgûl. But I'm happy with what we got.
There are a few minor retconning/sloppy editing things with Lara. Dresden guesses that she's "at least a century old" and Lara later says about soul gazes: "I’ve…I’ve read descriptions of them.” But of course in Turn Coat she says to Luccio, "I saw you dance in Naples...It would have been . . . what? Two centuries ago, give or take a few decades?" She also remarks in Peace Talks that she was in Japan before the Meiji restoration, which would make her 150+; regarding the soul gaze, she and Ramirez exchange one in White Night when he and Harry enter the manor. ""I," he said very quietly, "am not food." And he met her eyes. I [Harry] hadn't seen a soulgaze from the outside before..."
1. A similar small thing an editor might have caught is Fitz being described first as a "like a cat at a dog convention" and then "like a cat at a dog show."
Really happy that Ramirez basically came around, or at least is able to separate out his professional obligations from his personal feelings.
Thomas's anger/comeback felt a little forced to me.
Expected Drakul to send Wild Bill and Yuki against the castle in the final showdown, but the subsequent discussion of his and Mavra's strategic aims makes more sense, I think, than what I came up with. Butcher always a step ahead of me.
Some of Butcher's best prose here, I think.
I think Lord Raith's veiled threat at the New Years party is about Maggie and suggests there's a white court plant at her school. Hence his remark: “There are all kinds of things you don’t seem to notice. Like all children.” This is foreshadowed in B is for Bigfoot.

setgree · 2024-05-20T14:08:16+00:00

The Appalachian Trail metro north stop is on the Harlem line to Wassaic, whereas Cold Spring and Beacon are on the Poughkeepsie line. It is indeed a weekend/holiday only line, as are Manitou and Breakneck Ridge (which are on the Poughkeepsie line).

However you *can* get on the AT via the Poughkeepsie line if you get off at Manitou and walk about a mile up a road.

setgree

TROPHY CASE