Why Telling People How Bad Factory Farming Is Doesn't Always Work

Today, I published a report on what the public really thinks about factory farming, and it has changed how I view our messaging strategies.

The report, written in collaboration with Laila Kassam and Natalie Braine from Project Phoenix, is based on a survey of 2,000 people in the UK to better understand their views on factory farming. What we found was pretty optimistic! Two-thirds of Brits say that factory farming is wrong or raises moral concerns, 54% want it ended or phased out (not just regulated), and a slim majority (51%) think we should all be eating a lot less meat.

Read the full report here!

While I was reviewing the data, one number kept sticking in my brain. We asked everyone what percentage of animals in the UK they thought were factory-farmed. 96% of respondents either underestimated the number or had no idea.

My first thought when I saw this massive knowledge chasm was the most obvious: correct it. Just tell people how bad it really is, and we’re halfway to solving the problem! It’s an instinctive and natural reaction that I had — but it’s also dead wrong.

In 1992, back when The Bodyguard was dominating the box office, researchers ran what would become an infamous study in donor psychology. People read a story about migratory birds drowning in uncovered oil ponds and were asked how much they’d pay to prevent it. Simple enough. The catch was that different people saw different numbers of affected birds — 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000. It made almost no difference in how the three groups chose to donate: $80, $78, and $88, respectively.

It’s been replicated many times since, swapping in different victims — refugees, farmed animals — creating a clear pattern: as the scale of a problem increases, our concern for it barely budges. We are all scope-insensitive.

There’s a reason our brains work this way. If we took the grief we feel for one suffering person and multiplied it by a million, our minds short-circuit — drowning in despair, fear, and helplessness. Instead, we undergo psychic numbing, an empathetic defense mechanism, which makes it harder for us to understand and act on big issues, like genocide, climate change, and of course, factory farming.

Factory farming is really, really, really bad, and really, really, really big: it affects billions of land animals every year and trillions when we count aquatic animals too. I often see animal advocates posting these factory farming statistics, hoping it’ll shock people into taking action. I get the instinct. But “billions of chickens are suffering right now” plopped onto an Instagram carousel, with no story attached, may actually do the opposite.

Statistics can work — here are the three ways I think are most strategic.

The first strategy comes from a study my old behavioral science lab ran in 2004 (well before my time, so I can’t take any credit) that examined how our mindsets affect rational thinking.

The researchers primed participants to either think in a logical, calculating way (by making them do math problems) or an emotional way (by making them explain their feelings related to certain words). Then, they gave them another task, which they thought was unrelated: evaluating the cost of either 5 or 10 Madonna CDs. It turned out that the state of mind someone was in before making this evaluation was crucial: the thinkers valued the CDs more rationally, i.e., they valued 10 CDs as roughly double 5 CDs. But the feelers didn’t. They judged the groups of CDs as worth about the same. The paper replicated the idea three times in different domains: people who think in a calculated way judge the value of numbers more accurately than people who think emotionally.

If this all seems like mumbo-jumbo, think of it this way: feeling is an on-off switch: we either care about the Madonna CDs or we don’t. Calculation is a sliding scale: we are more sensitive to increases in value and rate it proportionately.

To help people to better understand the scale of factory farming, we need to get them into a calculating state of mind, not a feeling one. Easier said than done — we can’t exactly walk up to strangers and hand them multiplication tables, now can we?

Instead, we can catch them when they’re already making comparative evaluations. When we compare two or more options — say, which charity on a list to donate to — we are more likely to take scale into account, likely because our minds are primed for these types of calculations. But if we are only looking at one option, the problem of scale comes back. Researchers call these joint evaluation and single evaluation, respectively.

Most pro-animal actions are single evaluations. People don’t sit down and weigh the pros and cons of various diets — they think about whether veganism is right for them. Other scenarios do involve joint evaluations: choosing your next job or career, picking a charity to donate to on a non-profit evaluator, or choosing an investment portfolio that doesn’t invest in factory farming. This is when statistics are most likely to be convincing.

Why aren’t more people changing their diets? In 2022, researchers at Pax Fauna interviewed dozens of meat-eaters to pop the hood on the underlying psychological resistance to meat reduction. They found a predictable sequence in their interviewees: avoidance, guilt, then lots of justifications. If you read my piece on cognitive dissonance, the various rationalizations — humans won’t stop eating meat; there is no ethical consumption under capitalism — shouldn’t be too surprising. They all appealed to a sense of futility. If you can’t solve the issue, why bother even trying?

The Pax Fauna research taps into a psychological concept known as pseudoinefficacy: seeing individuals we can’t help makes us feel bad, even outweighing the warmth we feel from helping others. If we toss one starfish into the sea, we’re still going to be bummed out seeing all the ones we couldn’t help. For many, this prevents taking any action at all.

To beat that futility, we need to provide a scalable solution, ideally one the person can contribute to themselves. This works best when their action is directly linked to the solution, like when a citizen votes for an anti-factory farming ballot initiative or a dining director decides to implement a plant-based default in their cafeteria.

For someone who doesn’t have institutional power to stop factory farming (which is most of us), we’ll need to use other methods of persuasion. Dynamic social norms — where we communicate the momentum of a solution — are one possibility. That would involve saying something like “plant-based eating is the fastest-growing dietary pattern in our country.”

People are more likely to absorb the scale of the problem when they believe they are well-placed to actually help fix it.

Humans are weird sometimes. We respond more positively when we can solve a greater chunk of a problem, regardless of the raw number of individuals we’ve managed to help. We grab onto percentages, not raw numbers, even though the number of individuals helped is what actually matters. Sometimes, we will even choose to help fewer people (100 out of 200) if it’s a larger percentage of the people in need than another group (120 out of 1,000). That’s wild!

If you tell people they can save 200 animals — a rounding error in the grand scheme of the world’s farming systems — they’ll just shrug. But if they can save 200 out of 250 animals, they’ll be more likely to jump into action. Here’s what it can look like in practical terms: some stats about local factory farms — “there are four factory farms in our district, so let’s unite to convert them,” feels a hell of a lot more doable than “there are 80 billion chickens suffering in the world, so eat some cauliflower hot wings.”

It’s also one reason why I suspect the Ridglan farm rescue succeeded — because so few animals were involved, people felt they had a real chance of making a change for them and were thus more motivated to take action.

We have a psychological predisposition for picking low-hanging fruit, so let’s use that to our advantage.

The knowledge gap about factory farming is very, very real. But simply telling people about how big the problem is won’t move them to act. As tempting as it is to shout big, scary statistics into the void, we need to be smarter than that.

It’s best to only communicate the immense scale of factory farming when people are A. already thinking in a logical and comparative way (like when they’re choosing from a list of charities), B. well-placed to work on a solution (like for important stakeholders or during a key vote), or C. seeing the problem shrunk down to feel more solvable (like in a local campaign).

If we can’t do one of these things, it’s probably best to skip the statistics entirely and simply get people to care about a specific animal. You are probably familiar with the phrase “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” It’s true. We are more likely to feel empathy for a single individual than for a group, including a group of animals.

The Project Phoenix report is full of numbers, but we need to communicate them effectively. Lead with the ones that build momentum — like how a majority of Brits are opposed to or concerned about factory farming — and only mention the problem’s scale when people are ready to calculate, act, or shrink the problem down to size.

The facts are on our side. Let’s use them strategically.

Like learning practical, evidence-based lessons to make your advocacy more effective? That’s exactly why I write More Than Meats The Eye — behavioral research translated into strategy you can actually use. It’s free, and always will be.