Is it even possible to convince people to stop eating meat?

Factory farming is a particularly wicked problem to solve.

It’s a moral atrocity, involving the confinement and slaughter of hundreds of billions of animals globally each year. It’s a blight on the environment. It’s terrible for slaughterhouse workers, many of whom suffer from PTSD, anxiety, or depression. Yet factory farming produces something almost everyone wants and that has become culturally, economically, and politically entrenched: cheap meat, milk, and eggs.

Despite strong public concern for cruelty to farmed animals and large swathes of Americans telling pollsters that they’re trying to cut back on meat, we keep eating more of it. And research has shown that it’s nearly impossible to persuade most people otherwise. But a new study, which hasn’t yet been published and is currently under review at an academic journal, might complicate that consensus.

Learning how the sausage gets made

In the experiment, University of Toronto professors Lisa Kramer and Peter Landry recruited 1,149 students and separated them into two groups. One group watched a 16-minute clip from the harrowing animal rights documentary Dominion about the treatment of pigs in meat production, while a control group watched a video about the role mushrooms play in forest ecosystems.

In surveys taken before the study, immediately after watching the video, and a week later, participants were asked to choose a protein — bacon, chicken, steak, tofu, or none — to add to a meal.

Before watching the video, 90.1 percent of students chose meat in their meal; a week after watching the video, 77.9 percent did — a 12.2 percent decline. Demand for pork, specifically, fell more sharply.

“Turns out, it’s harder to order meat after watching Dominion,” Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, wrote in a blog about the study. “And it’s especially harder to order pork after watching the segment on pigs.” (Green didn’t work on the study but did provide the authors feedback on its design.)

Plenty of researchers have shown videos similar to Dominion to study participants and found little to no effect. So what made this one different? Kramer and Landry say it could simply be the high-quality nature of the film.

It was filmed in high definition and artfully edited, with close-up shots of distressed pigs, while most other factory farm footage is low-quality and shaky. It’s a disturbing and unflinching look at industrial pig farming, though the narrator — actor Rooney Mara — speaks with a flat tone, as she carefully guides the viewer through practices that, on their face, should be illegal but are common and lawful. Some of those practices include:

What’s more, the clip that participants watched makes no appeal for them to eat less meat or more plant-based foods, leaving viewers to come to their own conclusions. “The task of connecting the experiences of pigs on industrial-scale farms (as depicted in the video) to one’s own consumption choices is left entirely to the viewer,” Kramer and Landry wrote in the paper. (A lot of studies on the impacts of factory-farming documentaries use advocacy videos that directly ask the viewer to eat less meat.)

The study certainly has limits. For one, the average participant was 22 years old and participants skewed slightly female; young people and women are both groups that are more likely to be concerned about cruelty to farmed animals. And it only followed the participants for one week after the experiment.

Lastly, researchers didn’t track what participants actually ate. Instead, the students indicated which protein they would add to a meal, with the understanding that they had a roughly 50 percent chance of winning a voucher for the meal they chose at a university cafeteria. At first, this struck me as a poor proxy for real-world behavior. But the researchers noted that another study that used a similar voucher approach and tracked what students actually ate found little discrepancy.

All this suggests that persuading individuals to eat less meat — a goal that many in the animal advocacy movement have largely given up on — might not be as hopeless as previously thought.

Why animal rights groups largely gave up on trying to change people’s diets

The University of Toronto study results pleasantly surprised Green, who researches how to move society away from factory farming. For a time, he had been convinced that efforts to persuade people to eat less meat — especially with appeals to animal welfare — were ineffective.

His beliefs were informed by his research: Late last year, he and some colleagues published a meta-analysis, which is currently under peer review, looking at more than three dozen rigorous studies designed to persuade people to eat less meat. Overall, the studies found little to no effect. (It’s worth noting, however, that a few studies involving much lengthier interventions, like reading an essay and joining a 50-minute group discussion or sitting through a lecture, have demonstrated sizable effects).

Green’s findings align with a change in the animal rights movement that took hold around a decade ago.

Since the 1970s, animal advocates have poured a lot of resources into persuading people to go vegetarian or vegan. Organizations ran expensive advertising campaigns, handed out millions of pamphlets at universities, lectured in classrooms, and penned letters to the editor and op-eds in newspapers, among many other tactics. But in spite of all the effort, American meat consumption kept rising.

By 2015, the largest animal advocacy organizations were shifting their focus toward political and corporate campaigns to ban some of the most egregious factory-farm practices, like tiny cages for pigs and egg-laying hens. Some groups also advocated for technological change — namely, making plant-based meat taste better, more affordable, and more widely available. The idea was that instead of trying to influence one person at a time, which had proven so difficult, they’d instead change the food system.

The pivot produced a lot of tangible progress for animals: Over a dozen states have restricted cages for farmed animals, and plant-based meat tastes better and is more widely available than ever. But I’ve wondered whether animal advocates have given up on public persuasion too soon, and in turn, made it harder to maintain their hard-won institutional and technological progress.

Progress won through corporate or political campaigns might struggle to withstand backlash “if there isn’t also culture change happening and people’s attitudes shifting” about factory farming, Laura Driscoll, a social scientist who works at the Stray Dog Institute — a foundation that funds groups working to reform the food system — told me.

For example, plant-based meat sales jumped significantly between the late 2010s and early 2020s, but they’ve recently dipped back down. There might be a bigger market for these products, and more consumers might be immune to the fallacious argument that they’re overly processed, if more people were persuaded of the ills of factory farming.

Some states are now rolling back animal welfare laws that advocates had previously persuaded them to adopt, while some members of Congress are pushing to eliminate all state-level cage bans. Many food companies that pledged to eliminate eggs from caged hens in their supply chain aren’t following through. In the absence of a broader base of voters and consumers who see factory farming as an important social issue, corporations and politicians know they can backslide without much resistance.

Compared to straightforward metrics like how many pigs are still trapped in cages, culture change is “harder to understand and harder to measure,” Driscoll said, so it’s hard to know how much animal rights groups should invest in it. And if it works, it takes a lot of time and repeated exposure to get there. A study participant may not alter their meat consumption after watching one video or reading an essay, but they might change over time if they hear about it enough — and hear persuasive messages that appeal to them.

Currently, people are receiving very few messages about factory farming or meat reduction, as it’s rarely covered in the news or discussed by politicians. Videos about the issue hardly ever go viral, and animal advocacy groups have pulled back from education and persuasion.

Meanwhile, as Green told me, consumers are inundated with messages telling them to eat more meat. Some of those messages are explicit, like fast food advertisements or influencers telling us we need more (animal) protein, to implicit ones, like recipe videos on social media or our friends and family members eating a standard American diet rich in meat. Meat companies also mislead consumers to believe farmed animals are treated much better than they actually are.

It’s hard to imagine the public making meaningful reductions in meat consumption or advocating for significant changes to factory farming in this political, social, and information ecosystem. As researchers are prone to saying, more research is needed to know what could persuade more people on this issue: “There’s just not that much great research out there,” Green said. “If you’re a researcher in this field and you want to make a contribution, it’s not that hard to be the first person to do something.”

The case for both dietary change and meat industry reforms can be made persuasively. Based on the Dominion study, it might only take 16 minutes of an unvarnished look into factory farms for it to break through to some people. In today’s crowded attention environment, capturing those 16 minutes of people’s time will be harder than ever, but Green said it’s still worth the effort.

“I think that persuasion is a beautiful thing where we try to convince people using reason and argument, and take them seriously” as moral agents, he said. “I do not want to give up on this.”