Hello everyone, this is TheVeganReport and my
name is Sandro Ianni. I'm a PhD student in psychology
at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. There
I'm working with Professor Chris Hubwood at the
Personality Psychology Lab. In today's episode
I have the great pleasure to present some of
the research I've conducted so far during my
PhD. My research can be broadly summarized as
studying the political psychology of sustainable
plant -based food system change. What this means
is that I'm taking a psychological perspective
to look at the political factors that shape our
journey towards a world where food production
and consumption is more beneficial to humans,
the environment and non -human animals. I've
decided to structure this episode around several
topics that guide my research and which are hopefully
also highly relevant to you as listeners. Each
part will feature some recently published or
soon to be published work, so I will be able
to share some fresh findings with you. My goal
is to provide you with the big picture and the
key research findings and to spare you some of
the details. But for those who would like to
take a deeper look I will share links to my papers
which are all open access in the description
of this episode. You can also find me on LinkedIn
where I regularly post research updates or you
can reach out to me via email. My contact information
will also be mentioned in the description. And
as a reminder you can find new episodes of this
series every Wednesday on this podcast. It would
be great if you could share this episode and
the podcast with your community. Okay, so the
first question I will be talking about today
is what are some political challenges and opportunities
for sustainable plant -based food system change?
Here I will mainly talk about a study where we
analyze large sets of public opinion data from
Switzerland. The goal was to identify differences
and similarities across the political spectrum
when it comes to priorities around food system
issues. So things like environmental protection,
domestic food production or animal welfare. After
that part I will cover another study where we
looked at the political polarization around farm
animal welfare across the entire European Union
and the UK. Then the next question I'll be talking
about today is what are some challenges and opportunities
for the animal welfare movement in the current
political context. This part will feature content
from a recently published commentary article
in FAIR, which is the journal on the psychology
of human -animal intergroup relations. As a fourth
topic, I will briefly talk about a study where
we checked how communication shapes engagement
with food system change advocacy across the political
spectrum. And lastly I will share a quick outlook
on some upcoming projects. As a short note before
I start, in this episode I will often talk about
differences across the left -right political
spectrum and I want to highlight here that these
statements will represent statistical trends
and are meant to make findings more comprehensible.
But of course political beliefs are complex and
not all individuals with similar political orientations
will hold identical opinions about the things
I will talk about. So just keep that in mind.
With that let's jump into the first question
about political challenges and opportunities
for sustainable food system change. I think it's
safe to say that reforming established food systems
brings a lot of challenges. Like in other areas,
there are strong interest groups which tend to
oppose more meaningful changes. And I won't talk
so much about this aspect today. But often there
is also, to some extent at least, some skepticism
from the larger public. People might worry about
what change will mean to them personally, so
their living conditions, for their values and
for the world they know. And as a psychologist
I'm particularly interested in public opinions.
In my view, if we want to make food systems more
sustainable, we first need to understand what
priorities and concerns people have. Otherwise,
reforms could face backlash, which could mean
significant setbacks for reforms that are actually
very pressing. So in short, reforms must align
with what people value. Now the challenge is
that people are in many ways different from each
other, also with respect to their values. A convenient,
although not perfect way to approximate differences
in values is to ask people about their position
on the left -right political spectrum. From political
psychology we know that there are certain values
and worldviews that are, at least on average,
more strongly endorsed on either side of the
political spectrum. These broad values and worldviews
are often quite useful to understand why people
across the political spectrum hold different
opinions on more concrete topics. Some researchers
have already attempted to make a link between
political orientation and food system issues,
most prominently regarding environmental and
climate protection. In the first paper I want
to present today titled political orientation
and attitudes about agricultural reforms around
sustainability. I've examined relationships between
political orientation and various food system
issues in Switzerland. This project was realized
together with my supervisor Chris Hopewood and
two researchers from the Swiss Competence Center
for Agricultural Research. I'm Janine Ammann
and Judith Irek. For the project we used existing
public opinion data from our collaborators and
also data from post -vote surveys of recent popular
initiatives around agricultural policies. So
for some context in Switzerland citizens can
regularly vote on policy proposals as a form
of direct democracy. And for this project we
were interested in three separate proposals that
would have brought substantial changes to the
Swiss food system. Two were primarily focused
on promoting the environment. That is, one was
an initiative on biodiversity promotion. and
the other was the so -called drinking water initiative.
So their major focus was to reduce the use of
chemicals in agriculture. And the third initiative
was about animal welfare and basically demanded
that the abolishment of vector farming in Switzerland.
All three initiatives were rejected by roughly
60 percent of voters. I would say that these
cases nicely highlight the importance of public
opinions for food system reforms, particularly
in Switzerland with its rather distinct political
system. But I think it is also safe to say that
in other kinds of democracies, such reforms would
face small chances to pass or even get onto the
political agenda if a majority of voters oppose
them. But now back to the study. So we analyzed
the data of almost 10 ,000 Swiss residents who
provided information about their political views
on a common left -right self -placement scale.
For some of them there was also data on how they
rated the importance of different criteria that
might matter when one buys food and The same
people also provided ratings on the personal
importance of different food policy issues. So
in other words, we had information about people's
priorities as consumers and voters. And many
of these assessed shopping criteria and political
policy issues were very similar. So for instance,
they included animal welfare, various environmental
issues, questions about food prices or social
standards in food production. And what we then
did is we tested the association between political
orientation and those importance ratings. The
results, or the results, the main results at
least suggested that among people with more political
left orientation all environmental goals were
prioritized. So that means that issues like biodiversity,
reducing plant protection products or the use
of plant protection products, nutrient surpluses
and particularly reducing greenhouse gas emissions
from food production were given more importance
on the left. And this aligns with a lot of previous
research. which tends to show that most environmental
issues tend to be quite polarized today. As we
describe in the paper, some of this research
argues that this difference could be due to how
people on the left versus right tend to assign
moral concerns differently. But there's also
some evidence that at least part of this division
might come from how environmental issues are
discussed by political parties and the media.
With people on the political right, on the other
hand, we found that they valued increasing domestic
food production more strongly and also showed
stronger commitments to meat consumption. The
second point is already already relatively common
finding in research but in our study we expanded
this finding in some way by looking also at two
more indirect indicators of meat attachment.
The way we did this is a bit more complex so
I recommend checking the paper if you are interested
in this. Concerning the finding on domestic food
production there was actually less prior research
on this particular topic. However, there were
good reasons to expect this association because
of how a strong domestic food sector could promote
more typically conservative values. Another insight
from the study is that people with more right
-leaning orientations tended to be less willing
to compromise on farmers income and low food
prices for environmental policy goals. Here I
should note that we were able to examine individuals
willingness to compromise on certain issues by
having questions where people had to make decisions
in sort of a trade -off scenario. So basically
people had to say how they would weigh the importance
of two contrasting policy goals. And this measure
was particularly interesting because in reality
it is oftentimes difficult to give equal weight
to all issues at once. Now concerning farmed
animal welfare, we found that even though importance
ratings were slightly higher on the left, Concerns
were also quite high on the right. For example,
among people on the right, there was a tendency
to weigh animal welfare equally to domestic food
production, protecting farmers' incomes and low
food prices. Interestingly, it turned out that
animal welfare was less of a polarizing issue
than environmental protection. We found that
even with the post -vote survey data, the effect
of political orientation on the likelihood of
rejecting the factory farming initiative was
smaller than for both environmentally focused
initiatives. Later in this episode I will talk
about the relationship between political orientation
and animal welfare in more detail. A final observation
from this study I wanted to share with you is
that people on the left and right did not differ
in how important foods taste, price and healthiness
was to them. So taken together I think our study
provides some important insight into how the
chances for sustainable food system reforms could
be improved. I think a pragmatic pragmatic way
forward needs to be one where reforms will respect
the priorities of both sides of the political
spectrum and this could be done by forming packages
of policy instruments that attempt to balance
concerns for environmental protection on the
one hand as well as domestic production, farmers
income and food prices on the other side. Of
course this might be more challenging than pursuing
a one -sided focus, but I think ultimately that
forming broader coalitions and ensuring wider
public support will be more successful and a
more feasible long -term strategy. Fortunately
there were also certain things where disagreements
were smaller or even absent. So overall promoting
a food system that produces affordable tasty
and healthy food is definitely a good idea. And
as our study also showed there tends to be more
of a political consensus around animal welfare
in Switzerland. In the next section I will share
some data on these specific issues for the broader
European context. But before I do that, as a
final note to the study, I wanted to mention
that we also looked at people's trust in farmers
and in environmental and animal welfare advocacy
organizations, and we also analyzed support for
the main campaign arguments from those three
initiatives. So if this kind of stuff is interesting
and relevant for you, feel free to check out
the paper. Let's move on to the second question
of today's episode, which is about how political
orientation relates to concerns for farm animal
welfare across countries from the European Union
and the UK. As I mentioned earlier, in Switzerland
we found that there was a relatively small association
between more left political orientation and concerns
for animal welfare. This is actually a quite
common finding in research, but so far most studies
have been conducted with people from North America
or Northwestern Europe. Because this pattern
tends to be quite consistent, there has been
some theorizing about a possible connection between
more typical left -wing values and animal welfare
concerns. Broadly summarized, the arguments are
that people on the left are often more in favor
of expanding moral concerns and are concerned
with establishing equality, whereas on the right
there is a stronger desire for respecting traditions
and preserving the status quo. Now, as with prioritizing
climate goals, it is also likely that some of
these differences are due to context effects.
This is why it is important to look at a more
diverse set of countries and to compare differences
across time. And for those reasons we conducted
a study on the political polarization of farm
animal welfare across the entire EU, so including
many countries where there has been no research
on this topic before. In this study, which is
not published yet, we used existing data from
the Eurobarometer survey where questions about
farm animal welfare were asked. So those surveys
are conducted on behalf of the European Union
with representative samples from each member
state. There were three surveys which asked the
same questions about farm animal welfare concerns,
one in 2006, one in 2015, and one in 2023. For
the UK we only had the data for the first two
waves because of Brexit. Simply put, we then
tested how self -reported left -right political
orientation was correlated with reported concerns
for farm animal welfare. There were multiple
questions on this topic, each with a somewhat
different focus. We analyzed those separately
but I will focus on the two most central questions
where results were very similar. That is one
asked about the personal importance of farm animal
welfare and the other question asked about whether
one believes that farm animal welfare needs to
be improved in one's country. Our results indicated
that on average across all countries and time
points There was a very small association in
the direction of stronger concerns with more
left political orientation. There was also not
much evidence that the average association changed
between 2006 and 2023. However, we found important
variation across countries. I won't go into details
for specific countries, but overall the tendency
was that the association with left orientation
was stronger in countries from northwestern Europe
compared to countries from southern Europe and
particularly eastern Europe. In addition, our
analysis suggested that between 2006 and 2023
this association got stronger primarily in northwestern
European countries. So all together these patterns
suggest that differences in country context might
matter. And to explore this a bit more, we also
tested whether two kinds of context factors could
help to explain our findings. Firstly, we took
information about each country's level of economic
and social development at each time point. Specifically,
we used the UN's Human Development Index. Secondly,
we tried to gather information about how political
parties within each country politicized animal
welfare. For that we downloaded parties, election
manifestos and coded how often they mentioned
animal welfare issues. I should note here that
we did not code how exactly they talked about
animal welfare, just the frequency, but our analysis
was restricted on content that had a pro -animal
welfare focus, so the general direction was clear.
The paper will provide more details on how this
indicator was created. Now, across countries
and our free time points there was a strong positive
correlation between the development index and
the party politicization of animal welfare. So
in more developed countries parties also tended
to mention this issue more frequently. We also
found that overall left -oriented political parties
tended to highlight animal welfare more often,
especially those parties from the green party
family. We were able to test this because the
party manifesto data also provided an indicator
of parties' left -right positioning. Now importantly,
both context factors also roughly aligned with
geographic regions, and help to statistically
explain the polarization pattern among the general
population. So the higher the development index
and the more parties mentioned animal welfare,
the more there was an association between left
political orientation and farm animal welfare
concerns. At this point I should highlight that
this finding is correlational and we could not
test these things in a causal way. In the paper
we provide some theoretical reasoning for our
results. Essentially we hypothesize that higher
country development could promote an expansion
of moral concerns for animals, particularly among
progressives. And political parties mostly those
on the left, might then become more likely to
consider this issue for their political agenda.
This could increase the saliency of the topic
in political debates and parties might also start
to position themselves differently on this issue.
All of this could lead ultimately to stronger
issue polarization among the public. However,
we cannot rule out that other things like differences
in political institutions are involved. So taken
together, this study provides some nuance to
the relationship between political orientation
and concerns for farm animals. The role of context
might be bigger than we thought. Like with our
study in Switzerland, it is also important to
point out that in an absolute sense, reported
concerns for animals were quite high across the
political spectrum. So overall it seems more
that in certain countries there is a relatively
strong desire among people on the left for more
far -reaching reforms. And this brings me to
the next question I wanted to talk about. But
before that, quick reminder that if you would
like to read this paper when it's published,
I recommend following me on LinkedIn or setting
up a Google Alert. As a third topic of this episode,
I'm going to talk about political challenges
and opportunities for the animal welfare movement.
This part is largely based on a commentary piece
that I wrote together with Dylan de Gourville
and Seda Rice, which was recently published in
the Fair Journal. The starting point for this
article is the following question. How could
the animal welfare movement, which tends to be
rather left progressive, thrive in a world where
a lot of issues are politically polarized and
also where the public, parliaments and governments
have become more conservatively minded in many
places in the world. Like with other social movements
before, this kind of question can spark very
different opinions. Some people might think that
this context asks for more inclusive advocacy
and more openness for compromises. Others might
be hesitant to accept these ideas, either for
pragmatic or principled reasons. For our commentary
we first gathered some of the common arguments
for both positions. Overall those arguments were
usually quite compelling and plausible. However,
they were also rather speculative since research
is somewhat missing in this area. In the second
part of this article we then describe ways in
which research could help to find more robust
answers. Our article is quite compact and only
about three pages long, so it's a short read.
But here are the main points. First, there are
pragmatic reasons for why advocacy might need
to become more politically inclusive. To pass
animal welfare policies, it is often essential
that there is a broader coalition of voters and
or politicians who support them. There are good
examples of this point relating to animal welfare,
but also if we look at other instances of social
reforms. Similarly, if caring about animal welfare
becomes something that people generally perceive
as left -wing, it could make the issue unnecessarily
divisive. where people engage with the topic
more from an us versus them perspective. And
such dynamics might be very hard to reverse later.
It can also be argued that the foundation for
more inclusive advocacy is already somewhat given.
As I described earlier, the differences across
the political spectrum are often not that large
and especially if one compares those to other
debated topics. The real question might not be
so much about whether one wants animal welfare
improvements, but how reforms should look like
and how far they should go. Now this last point
might be a source of possible tension within
movements. If reaching out to people with different
values means that one has to adapt demands and
messages to match those values, some advocates
might feel like they're not authentic. In addition,
it could mean that for the sake of reducing friction,
it becomes necessary to stay focused on a single,
well -defined issue, whereas other important
but potentially polarizing issues need to be
avoided. This could, for example, concern things
like climate change or social justice issues.
but often different movements are important allies
for each other's causes. So the question is whether
taking this path is worth the risk of potentially
hurting cross -movement collaborations. The last
point we raise in the argument section is that
supporting advocacy which comes from people who
actually identify as conservatives might be more
desirable. For them it would be more natural
to promote animal welfare as a right of center
issue and such advocacy would be more credible
on authentic. So an idea could be to support
movement building within more conservatively
minded organizations. We then go on in the article
with some ideas for future research related to
these arguments. This section is mostly targeted
at people working in the field either from academia
or NGOs so I therefore won't discuss these points
here but some things relate quite closely to
what I've talked about so far in this episode.
In the end of course it's the members of the
animal welfare movement who have to decide how
these different arguments and the corresponding
research should be weighted and used. Okay, let's
move on to the last research findings of today.
Here I will talk about an idea that has become
quite popular in psychological research over
the last couple of years and which basically
aims to reduce polarization around disputed topics.
It is a communication approach called moral reframing.
The simple idea is that if you want to make advocacy
for a certain topic more convincing to people
with different moral convictions, you need to
match your message content to the values of these
different groups. Or in other words you need
to use the right moral framing for your audience.
Based on my impression of the literature, there
is mixed evidence for the effectiveness of this
approach. It seems like it's often not as simple
as that and we probably need more research to
better understand why it works in some cases
and fails in others. The study I want to present
is an application of this moral reframing approach
to the advocacy for more plant -based food systems.
The goal wasn't to promote individual diet change
but to argue for the benefits of shifting the
larger food system. To do this we first picked
five general issues where a more plant -based
food system would bring benefits. Those were
animal welfare, environmental protection, food
security, public health and something we called
inconsistency in society. We then created two
message versions for each issue. One that was
framed in values more associated with the political
left and one with values from the right. For
the values we followed the common psychological
framework and we pre -tested the messages to
make sure the different values were explicit
enough. Next we conducted our first study where
people from Switzerland rated those messages
on how convincing they find them. Also they were
asked about their political orientation. After
this first study we conducted a second one which
was very similar but for that one we created
new message types where we separated two important
elements of the original messages. One type of
message only included the main moral appeal of
the originals excluding the actual reasoned arguments.
The other message type included only the reasoned
arguments, so there we removed all parts that
made explicit appeals to moral values. We did
this because most research on moral reframing
didn't compare morally framed messages to messages
where one only uses purely reasoning based messages.
and this is a problem because in some cases it
might be counterproductive to moralize an issue.
Now after conducting both studies we tested a
total of 32 messages which talked about one of
the five general issues use left or right framings
and a varied message type so like the moral framing
plus reasoning only moral framing or the only
recent arguments messages. All were rated on
the same evaluation scale. For the results I
focus here on the big picture. Our paper which
is not published yet will include an online tool
where one can find detailed comparison of individual
messages. What we found overall is that messages
which matched people's values were indeed more
convincing than those which mismatched people's
values. And this was especially the case for
people on the political left. So this means that
left value framed messages were more appealing
to those people than right value framed messages.
However, messages which only used reason and
reasoned arguments were actually even more appealing
to people on the left and for people on the right
the reasoning only messages were usually as strong
as those messages which used or which also included
right moral framing so at least in the context
of our study it seems like there is no real benefit
of framing messages in moral terms and it would
be better overall to stick to more reasoning
based messages. Importantly we also found that
the issue focus of messages made a considerable
difference. So environmental protection messages
were strongly appealing on the left but not so
much among the right. Conversely, domestic food
security messages were particularly strong on
the right, but not so much on the left, at least
compared to other topics. The issue that was
the strongest across the political spectrum was
animal welfare. Specifically, messages specifically
messages that had a harm -based focus but not
those which promoted more of an animal rights
appeal. I think it is also quite interesting
that the way these issues related to political
orientation in this study nicely replicate what
we found in the larger survey study with people
from Switzerland that I presented at the beginning
of this episode. So, taken together, our messaging
study makes a case for using more well -reasoned,
non -moralizing animal welfare arguments to promote
plant -based food systems across the political
spectrum. However, more research would be important
to check the robustness of our findings, especially
studies in more applied settings or in other
countries. As a final point I wanted to share
a short outlook on some future projects. A major
focus for my next studies will be about understanding
what shapes support for plant -based policies,
so policy measures that would promote a more
plant -based food system. This will include the
role of individual differences like political
beliefs but also much more than that. In general,
I think that there is a large research gap in
how we can promote more systemic solutions compared
to individual behavior change interventions and
studying policy support is an important pathway
to do this. Other than that, we are also looking
into how people's concerns about animals could
be measured in a more valid and reliable way.
Much of the research so far had to rely on somewhat
limited assessment tools which might prevent
us from uncovering individual differences in
more precise and informative ways. And with that
we've reached the end of today's episode. Before
I stop I would like to quickly bring your attention
to the amazing work that my colleagues are doing.
You should definitely check out the other research
of our team in Zurich. You will find the link
to our group website in the description. That's
all from me. Thank you very much for listening.
I appreciate your interest and feel free to share
this episode with those who might be interested
in today's topic. Thank you.