S6. E6: Jo Anderson: How To Create Real Change
“…there's this disconnect between our beliefs and our behavior and part of what can be useful for overcoming that is to change the behavior first, which sounds really counterintuitive.”
- Jo Anderson
Dr. Jo Anderson is the Research Director at Faunalytics, an organization that empowers animal advocates by providing them with access to research, analysis, strategies, and messages that maximize their effectiveness to reduce animal suffering.
Jo is an advocate for animals and empirical research. For over ten years, she has investigated key social psychological issues such as persuasion, judgment, and decision-making, exploring how these concepts can be used to make the world a better place for humans and animals. That is what happens at Faunalytics, they do the research and enable real change.
I learned a lot from Jo – mostly, that research changes the story and so often, reveals that the opposite of what seems obvious is in fact the truth.
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Transcript:
Jo: [00:00:15] People don't have a really great understanding of the origins of COVID-19. The fact that it did come from animals and that it specifically came from animals that are kept in conditions that are very similar to the way we keep almost all of our farmed animals in North America.
Elizabeth : [00:00:37] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. For the months of May and June Species Unite is celebrating plant based eating with vegan nights. Vegan nights really just means we'd love for you to invite friends over or just cook for your family, but make a plant based meal. Take a photo posted to Instagram with the hashtag Species Unite vegan nights and you will be entered to win one of six, two hundred and seventy five dollar gift baskets filled with all sorts of vegan delights. So go to our website to sign up SpeciesUnite.com. This conversation is with Jo Anderson. Jo is the research director at Analytics for Analytics is an organization that empowers animal advocates with access to research analysis strategies and messages that maximize effectiveness to reduce animal suffering.
Elizabeth : [00:01:51] Hi Jo, how are you doing?
Jo: [00:01:53] I'm good, thanks. How are you?
Elizabeth: [00:01:54] Really good. Thank you. Tell me a little bit about you before we even talk about faunalytics Did you grow up and think about animals in any way or advocacy or veganism?
Jo: [00:02:05] My mom was vegetarian my whole life since the seventies, I believe.
Elizabeth: [00:02:11] Why was she vegetarian?
Jo: [00:02:12] For the animals.
Elizabeth: [00:02:13] But you guys weren't or?
Jo: [00:02:15] We weren't, which I guess is always a choice that parents have to make.
Elizabeth: [00:02:18] Well, and especially back then.
Jo: [00:02:20] Yeah, it was really difficult, much harder than now, and my dad wasn't. So it was always kind of on my radar because of that. It was in my undergraduate that I went vegetarian myself and then kind of didn't think about it for a long time. I ended up going to grad school for social psychology. I was planning on going academic at first, and I ended up switching into government. Then finally, it was kind of a long and winding road. Once I joined faunalytics and I was getting exposure to all of the issues. A Lot of the time I realized what vegetarianism was to me. It was kind of a bit of a shelter from some of those additional pieces of information. So learning more about it, I ended up going vegan.
Elizabeth: [00:03:08] That's a really good kind of story for someone who does the kind of work you do because I think it probably gives you a lot of understanding. I mean by studying social psychology, that would help you understand how human brains work and what we don't want to see. I'm sure there's a lot there that you already had kind of in your wheelhouse before faunalytics.
Jo: [00:03:30] I think so. Yes, social psychology is very useful for that kind of perspective. It is nice that I have that personal perspective of coming from a period of my life where I didn't think about it a whole lot. If I ever started to think about it, I would feel uncomfortable with some of the ideas and the things that I was learning. I would fairly deliberately say that's enough of learning about chickens suffering on factory farms. I don't want to know that right now.
Elizabeth: [00:03:59] For people who've never heard of faunalytics, what do you guys do?
Jo: [00:04:02] We are a nonprofit focused on research. So we find journal articles on topics that are relevant to animal advocates about a wide range of things, and we have volunteers who summarize them in a simplified way and in a way that is designed to be useful for someone who wants to help animals.
Elizabeth: [00:04:22] How does it work if faunalytics? Do you guys work on specific studies and research all the time or are new things coming in? How does the whole big picture of it all work?
Jo: [00:04:33] In terms of the research? We go through a prioritization cycle where each year we try to gather potential research questions from advocates, people in the movement based on what they think that they think is important, what they need to know. There are so many things that we need to know as advocates, that it's really difficult to even come up with a list that feels comprehensive, let alone actually answer all the questions that we get. But that's the first step we take. Then we look at those questions in terms of how much impact they'll have. We take the ones that will be as impactful as possible and also feasible for us to get through to produce data that is meaningful for advocates. Those are the projects we take on. Then people like me will actually do the data collection and write up the results and all of that.
Elizabeth: [00:05:24] What are some that you're working on now?
Jo: [00:05:27] Right now perhaps the one that I am most excited about is one looking at the effectiveness of different advocacy tactics. So you kind of alluded to this earlier by saying some kinds of advocacy seem like they can be really off putting those really in-your-face graphic videos, things like that. We hear that kind of statement a lot like that that is off putting, but there's actually not great data about that. The goal of this study is to really compare all these different types of advocacy, not every type, because they're infinite. But look at different things like graphic videos, online protests and even the difference between a peaceful protest, people just standing with signs versus a disruptive protest like people lying down in traffic or that kind of thing versus documentaries versus books versus a whole bunch of other things. We're just getting a sense first of whether people have experienced these things and what their reactions to them were. Whether they say that they made them reduce their meat consumption, whether they made them angry. Other things as well. So really getting an initial reaction to each of those different things that we can then compare. Then we'll follow up as well with some experimental work that I won't get into, but trying to establish more firmly whether seeing those different things causes certain behaviors, positive or negative.
Elizabeth: [00:06:48] That's actually really fun during the experimental work. I'm sure.
Jo: [00:06:51] Yes, I'm really looking forward to it, I love this study. It's been a long time coming and I think a lot of advocates are really interested in it and excited about it because it's such a fundamental question in what we do, not just what is the really specific message I'm going to put in this video, but do I use a video or do I go out there with a signboard? What is going to work better?
Elizabeth: [00:07:12] Which is crazy that that's that no one actually really knows, right?
Jo: [00:07:15] It is. It's just from a research perspective. It's one of those questions that is super important, but really difficult because the different types of advocacy are so different. We're taking a stab at it.
Elizabeth: [00:07:27] I've heard you talk about the how versus why when it comes to talking about veganism. Will you talk about that a little bit? Because I think most vegans, especially new vegans or really just kind of vegans on a mission, really want to jump into the why.
Jo: [00:07:45] It's the most obvious piece of the story for a lot of people. This is why we need to do this. This is why it's so important. But it can be difficult to remember that probably even before you as a vegan doing this kind of work became vegan, you probably knew some part of the things that later made you vegan. That is to say, on some level, everyone is aware that animals are raised on factory farms, that they are slaughtered and that the conditions are not good there. At least in the western world that's become relatively common information a lot of the time. What you're trying to overcome by talking to people about changing their diet or their approach to animals is a feeling of not being able to do it, as opposed to not knowing why you should do it. By not being able to. I mean, all kinds of things, either meat is too important to me. I just really love the taste. It's such an important part of my family life. I think that the health and nutrition aspects are really important, right down to living in an area where it's difficult to get alternative proteins. All of those things play in and, in my opinion, play a larger role than lack of education these days. Most people will probably already know a fair bit about those things, even if they haven't looked into it. But knowing the how is just incredibly important for making it seem like an accessible choice for everyone, as opposed to a thing that a few fringe weirdos are doing.
Elizabeth: [00:09:15] With a lot of people, If you do try to approach them with any sort of factory farming talk or video. Not only do they not want to know, but it's actually a turnoff. They don't want to even consider a beyond burger at that point because they don't want to be associated with that kind of banter. But there's something that I think just compels everybody, especially when they first go vegan, to want to scream it from the rooftops. It's a big learning curve that I think most people who stay vegan long enough go through.
Jo: [00:09:52] Yeah, I don't have data to speak to that, but I will say that that's my personal experience as well for other people. Previously our executive director J had been in the movement for decades. He said that was his process. He went from a loud demonstrating vegan, wanting to just shake people to tell them the truth. Over time he came to appreciate that, ok, I've been doing this for this long. You kind of see the effect that it has or the effect that it doesn't have and over time realize that that's as appealing as it is emotionally. It's not the most effective strategy.
Elizabeth: [00:10:32] Well, and I think to the how when you talk about ‘how’ it's more of a positive right, the house not really a negative conversation, ever. That's kind of where in a lot of ways, I especially think with the younger vegan movement, it's so positive now that it's way more contagious.
Jo: [00:10:50] The ‘how’ really listens to the other person and understands their perspective and capitalizes on commonalities rather than focusing on what you're doing wrong.
Elizabeth: [00:11:00] So talk a little more about this study that you did the reduction versus going flat out vegan?
Jo: [00:11:05] That one was a study that we did on a university campus, similar to a lot of animal advocacy methods that you see. It showed a video to people who were just passing by, most of whom were students. There were two different groups of people. The video that they saw was the same either way. It shared some health information, environmental information and animal welfare information about the reasons why eating a lot of meat is a problem. The only difference between the two videos was whether the message that it was promoting while showing this was to reduce your meat consumption or go vegetarian. It wasn't even as strong as ‘Go vegan’ in the other condition. Afterward, we gave them a coupon for participating for watching the video that was just for five dollars off at the local coffee shop where they could get a salad. We looked at the percentage of purchases of meatless sandwiches from that shop, which had some really nice options like falafel and things like that. What we found was that the people who had gotten the reduction message were more likely to purchase a meatless sandwich than the people who had gotten the vegetarian message. Which feels very counterintuitive. But we do have some insight as to the reason because at the end of the video, we asked them, ‘Are you willing to pledge to sign your name to reduce the amount of meat that you eat?’ For the people who have seen the reduction video or ‘are you willing to pledge to go vegetarian?’ The difference in people who would agree to one of those two things, was 60 percent who said that they were willing to reduce and just 15 percent who are willing to try going veg. So just right there, you can see the huge difference. And that's what drove the people who had seen the reduced video to be more likely to then go and order the falafel sandwich instead of the chicken breast.
Elizabeth: [00:12:57] That's incredible. I'm sure for people who are doing it, it's a lot less scary, like it's easy to commit when you're committing to slowing down.
Jo: [00:13:09] Yeah and in an ideal world, I mean, we kept this pretty simple because we wanted comparability.
Elizabeth: [00:13:13] Right.
Jo: [00:13:14] But in an ideal world, you would go one further and say you commit to reducing. Now let's talk about how? So are you going to cut back one meal per week at first and then two meals per week? Or are you going to go product by product? But getting people to walk through a plan making it concrete would have, I'm sure, made those results even stronger.
Elizabeth: [00:13:35] I know you guys have done so much research and so many studies. But have there been some that have just shocked you to the bone in the sense of intuition versus like, what's been intuitive versus what's reality?
Jo: [00:13:47] Oh geez. Your intuition gets a little shot when you go through a psychology program. But from our recent work, I think the thing that comes to mind is a study we did looking at the impact of different animal products on the animals themselves. So the number of lives that go into producing different things, the number of days of suffering, essentially days on a factory farm that go into producing different things. Because a lot of the time when we're thinking about meat reduction, people have a tendency to start with red meat. They'll cut out beef, they'll cut out pork and then eventually they might cut out chicken. Even more eventually, they might cut out fish. But that's a very health focused perspective. What you see from this study is that it's the animals with the small bodies, the fish and the chickens who obviously have to die in the greatest numbers in order to produce the same amount of product for people to eat. When you look at these scales, the tops of the lists are just dominated by fish products, chicken products, filets, nuggets and egg products for chickens as well. Seeing that, I think, can be a little bit of a shock to the system.
Elizabeth: [00:15:05] I looked at the study and I was shocked. Why are scrambled eggs and omelets number one?
Jo: [00:15:10] They are right up there just because of the number of days that go into producing those products. Chickens are small and they produce one egg per day for the most part, sometimes a little less. So in order to get those scrambled eggs and omelets, it's quite a few days of that chicken being on that farm in order to produce the eggs that go into the omelet. On top of that, we took into account all of these other things that go into food production of any kind. There's loss due to the shrinkage of the food. When you cook it, there's loss due to food waste. There's mortality of the animals before they even make it to the point of slaughter or production, some of those chickens just die. So all of those things went into the calculation, as well as many more, all of which are on our site if you want to get into the math of it.
Elizabeth: [00:15:58] There are a lot of people who, whether they end up going vegan ultimately or not. They are much more comfortable, either reducing the amount of meat and dairy they eat in general or go product by product. If someone were to do the product by the thing by thing kind of way of just reduction. What makes sense in the sense of suffering to start with?
Jo: [00:16:24] Egg products, fish products, chicken products, those are going to be the number one things like fish filets, scrambled eggs. You already mentioned chicken nuggets, fish sticks, fish broth, pretty much, you name it, on the fish, chicken and egg products. Those are going to be near the top of the list. I'm trying not to promote eating other things instead. But if you're looking at the comparison, dairy products are much lower on the list because cows are larger. You don't need as many of them and they produce a fair bit of milk and we don't consume a ton of dairy at a time. So for me personally, when I was cutting back, I cut back slowly to go from vegetarian to vegan. It made it much easier to think, ok, I'm going to start with eggs because that's where the bigger impact is. I will eventually make it to the dairy. But that means that in the meantime, there are all these things I can still eat to not feel like I'm suffering through this process as much, just take it a step at a time.
Elizabeth: [00:17:27] Right now Kamala Harris is doing ‘Vegan till dinner', which is incredible, and I'm hoping that inspires a lot of people. But for people who are starting, like, are there ways that make it stick better than others?
Jo: [00:17:44] Yeah, there's lots of things we have done previous research on the difference between people who maintain vegan or vegetarian diets and the people who give them up. There are a lot of differences, but one of the biggest ones is social support. So if you can find people around you who are doing the same thing, who will try it with you, or even better, people who already are vegan or vegetarian to support you and encourage you. Having cheerleaders is so important, and they can also provide really concrete support about where you can find products. If you don't like the first thing that you try, that person is there to say, Oh, I didn't like that one either. Why don't you try this other brand instead? Especially nowadays, when there are so many plant based options, having someone to just point you in the right direction can be really useful. So if you don't have social support kind of built in already, you don't know anyone who's vegan or vegetarian. There's groups online, like all of the different campaigns, and organizations often have Facebook groups, and there will be meetup groups locally. All Kinds of things that you can do to find others who are like you trying it for the first time or have been doing it for a long time and are willing to be supportive. I can say for myself and every vegan I've ever met. Having someone come to you and say, ‘Can you help me go vegan or can you help me reduce my meat consumption?’ We love that. That is not a burden. So I don't think that there needs to be any worry about imposing on your friends or family members. If that's the case, they want to help.
Elizabeth: [00:19:14] Chances are they'll ask you to stay for dinner. For the month of May Species Unite is doing a month called Vegan Nights, where we think it's going to be mostly vegans, but you don't have to be vegan. Sign up and they get a packet with recipes and documentary ideas if they want those and ideas for the night, but basically make dinner for non vegans and post it and tag us, that sort of thing. It's kind of that message, though, like, Hey, I'm going to show you really good vegan food. We're really excited about it because already with so many people signing on because we just want to share being vegan, it's really easy in 2021, and it's really delicious. So I think that message is starting to get out more too. This research that you've done on the reduction versus straight up vegan kind of stuff. Does this impact? Did like animal advocacy groups, are people taking your research with that and using it in their messaging?
Jo: [00:20:17] Definitely. There's been a growing body of evidence that allowing for reduction supporting reduction as part of that journey is important and effective and can't be just ignored. And starting in part with a study that we actually did about five, six years ago now the one that I mentioned looking at current versus former vegans and vegetarians there to just the number of people who try it and end up giving it up because it's too hard, I think started a lot of the ball rolling in terms of people giving more respect to the idea of helping people in a slower transition if that's what works for them. Some people respond really well to the challenge of just turning it off overnight. No more meat, no more dairy, no more eggs ever again as of right now. But the number of people who are like that is relatively small. So I think as of that study, we're certainly not going to take full credit for that change. But we are seeing a lot more organizations that talk that way in terms of taking things one step at a time, reducing in the direction of veganism. Melanie Joy is one of my favorite people and is as vegan as possible. You don't need to be perfectly vegan today. You will probably not be perfectly vegan ever.
Elizabeth: [00:21:34] Even If you're vegan.
Jo: [00:21:35] Exactly, exactly. I am not a perfect vegan. No, just accepting that and getting rid of some of that all or nothing thinking is so helpful and something that we are seeing a lot more in the past five years or so,
Elizabeth: [00:21:47] Which is really cool because that's really shifted. One more thing I was reading with you about Faunalytics, COVID, zoonotic diseases, the public and preventing the next pandemic. Will you just talk on this because I get in the bubble for sure with this and I feel like everybody knows that the next pandemic is probably coming from a factory farm, probably. But I think most people don't know a whole lot about this one or the next one in the sense of our relationship with animals and what's happening.
Jo: [00:22:23] I completely agree. The research that we conducted that you're referring to is actually about a year old at this point. So, I'm starting to think, should we redo that, see how things stand now? But what we saw and what I think from other evidence is probably still fairly true is that, you're right, people don't have a really great understanding of the origins of COVID 19, the fact that it did come from animals and that it specifically came from animals that are kept in conditions that are very similar to the way we keep almost all of our farmed animals in North America. When we ask people just kind of to type in, where do you think that this came from? Apart from just understanding that it had something to do with animals, only half of the respondents even knew that. Then to get to the level of the wet market conditions in China. The animals in close proximity disease, it spread from animal to animal and animal to human. That level of nuance was just completely lost on almost everyone. We saw that 16 percent of people said something about wet markets, which is about as good as it got.
Elizabeth: [00:23:30] One thing that always kind of perplexes me, and I don't know if it's really a fundamental question or just a big, broad question. Most people care about animals and genuinely really do. Most people don't want harm and suffering. But in terms of growing the animal rights movement and getting more people to advocate for animals or go semi vegan or vegan. It's a big jump. Considering how many people care about animals. It's still a pretty small movement. How does it grow? What are the things that make it grow?
Jo: [00:24:06] Some of the things are the things that don't involve talking to individual people. We've seen much more of a movement in the last few years toward corporations going cage free with their egg supply. That change is something that has come out through the animal advocacy movement, with people going and lobbying those corporations to make that change. Because although it is small and incremental change for the chickens involved. It is a step in the right direction and it gets around some of those issues of people not changing their behavior, even though they say they care about animals. I believe that they do care about animals. It's just that issue I spoke about earlier of shoving that information aside or separating it from the fact that you eat meat. A lot of those divisions are their separations. In psychology it's called cognitive dissonance. I'm sure you've heard the term, and it just means there's this disconnect between our beliefs and our behavior. Part of what can be useful for overcoming that is to change the behavior first, which sounds really counterintuitive. But if you can get people to buy cage free eggs or to reduce their consumption for other reasons like health reasons or environmental reasons, and then get them to think about the fact that this is better for animals. At that point, it becomes less difficult to accept that, oh, that behavior was harmful for animals. So reflecting back on it now that I've already changed it somewhat, I can see that yes, I have made a step in the right direction for animals, and then maybe I can go a little further and cut out some other animal products or not buy eggs at all anymore. You kind of bypass that whole attitude issue to begin with.
Elizabeth: [00:25:50] For advocates who aren't really aware of faunalytics or aren't using you in the way that they could really be benefiting from. Will you just talk about that a little bit and how they could be?
Jo: [00:26:02] Yeah, absolutely. Anyone who wants to help animals take action for animals, whether that's farmed animals like we've been talking about or if it's wildlife, companion animals, animals that are used in science, there's something on our site for you. Probably the thing that you'll come across first is the library where you can type in any keywords. If what you're interested in is greyhound racing, you will find articles that have looked at some aspects of greyhound racing. If you're looking at dog adoptions, you'll find things about breed characteristics and other stuff like that. Our original research focuses on those topics I mentioned that have a really high impact. Often, that means farmed animal topics, but sometimes it's topics that apply more broadly to pretty much any type of advocacy, like things about donation. So that's there as well. We also have a section that's researched advice, conducting your own research and you know how to design a survey. Probably my favorite part of that, because I like talking to people, is that we have a virtual office hour, there are actually two, there's one that I do once a week and there's one that our content director Carl, who manages the library, does. So if you have questions about doing your own research or finding data that you need. Our office hours are there and you just come and do something like a Google Meet session where you just come in and we chat about whatever it is that you need.
Elizabeth: [00:27:20] That's really cool and so helpful.
Jo: [00:27:22] I hope so. I love doing it. I love talking to people and hearing about all the different issues that they run up against, ideas that they have and just ways of making change.
Elizabeth: [00:27:32] Well, it's so broad the whole animal world, and there's just so many different people fighting for different things. It is a place where everything kind of connects.
Jo: [00:27:42] Yeah, we're in a really lovely position. A unique position I think of straddling all of these different types of advocacy.
Elizabeth: [00:27:50] Well, Jo thank you so much for today. Thank you for everything that you guys are doing. It's incredible and everyone needs you. So it's awesome. Thank you.
Jo: [00:28:00] Thank you very much for having me.
Elizabeth: [00:28:11] To learn more about Jo and to learn about faunalytics, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything we are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe to Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we'd greatly appreciate it. Go to SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santino Polky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.
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