STUDY: Students eat less meat after studying ‘meat ethics’ lesson
The study confirms the importance of campus veg advocacy, and suggests campus advocacy can extend beyond improving veg options, to include campaigns to increase animal ethics courses or have animal studies as a major.
MIAN OSUMI: In this study, we can get a glimpse of how this applies to the animal advocacy movement, and the results were surprisingly optimistic: after learning about meat ethics in their philosophy class, students had a more negative impression of factory farming, pledged to eat more plant-based, and their dining hall purchases showed that they also followed through with action.
The content of the instruction for the 730 students in the study was: Reading James Rachels’ “Basic Argument for Vegetarianism” and Attending a 55 minute class period, during which half of the students watched an 11 minute vegetarian advocacy video called “What Came Before“, and then had a thirty-nine minute class discussion — while the other half of the students had a discussion with no video…
A questionnaire conducted before and after the lesson showed a change in students’ attitude towards factory farming, with the percentage of students that agreed that eating factory-farmed animal meat was unethical rising from 37% to a majority of 54% (+17%). Students changed their opinion less and were also less likely to agree that they should feel guilty if they ate factory-farmed animals (+10%), and even less so for whether they would actually avoid eating factory-farmed animals (+7%).
Students were also given the opportunity to anonymously pledge to avoid factory-farmed meat for 24 hours following the class. 39% of students took this pledge, and 85% of those students that pledged later self-reported that they followed that pledge…
The study also tracked (with anonymous tags, to protect student identity) students’ purchases to study actual behavior. Although the data was limited to the 113 students who used their student cards in the dining halls, the data that existed showed a marked decrease in students’ purchases containing meat after the class, from 29.7% to 23% (-6.7%) of overall purchases…
Purchase behavior was also the only outcome where there were substantial differences between students who had watched the factory farm video and those who didn’t. There was no significant difference between the two groups for answers to the questionnaire, and for the pledges, the non-video group even had slightly higher pledges than the video group.
However, when it came to what students bought, the video-watching group’s percentage of purchases with meat dropped 29.6% to 20.9% (-9%), while those in the non-video group’s purchases with meat dropped from 29.8% to 25.1% (-4.7%). This represents a difference of 190% for the video group… This could suggest that watching factory farm footage has more of an unconscious effect on people, where they don’t overtly change their opinion or give a vegetarian pledge, but in practice, they will eat less meat.
Screening such footage is a controversial topic with many non-vegans protesting its use, but this study suggests that with the viewer’s consent, these videos can have an impact on people’s behavior… Even these small individual changes would create a huge impact for the animals. It is, in some ways, very promising that just a ten-page reading and 55-minute class could change students’ behavior for weeks afterward…
Seeing this data confirms the importance of campus veg advocacy, and suggests campus advocacy can extend beyond improving veg options, to include campaigns to increase animal ethics courses or have animal studies as a major… For those interested in starting campus animal activism, or who would like to bring their current activism to the next level, check out The Humane League’s Student Alliance for the Animals. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: