#66. Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations - Prof. Dr. Christopher J. Hopwood

What factors underpin how we treat animals? In this episode, Prof. Dr. Christopher J. Hopwood of the University of Zurich and the Editor-in-Chief of Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations. Talks about his research related to how people perceive, treat, and interact with animals. Join us as we go through some fascinating studies which have been published in his journal and what the future looks like for things like veganism, animal treatment and upcoming food like cultured meat.

https://phair.psychopen.eu/index.php/phair

Transcript

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Welcome back everybody to the Smooth Brain Society.

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Today we will be talking about the psychology of human-animal interactions.

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For that,

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we have Dr.

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Chris Hopwood on,

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who is a professor of psychology at the University of Zurich.

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He is the editor-in-chief of Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations,

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which is a new open access journal for scientific inquiries into how humans

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interact with non-human animals.

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He is currently interested in how

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motives,

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attitudes,

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and behaviors associated with human-animal interaction change over time,

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and whether they can be changed with interventions,

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and how these changes are connected to broader concerns around environmental

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sustainability and social justice.

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So welcome, Chris.

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Thank you for coming on to the Smoothbren Society.

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Thanks for having me.

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And for those of you who are new, we always have a co-host on who has no clue about the topic.

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Today,

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I have grabbed my brother,

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Armour,

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to come back on to the podcast as a co-host,

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and he has no clue what we're talking about.

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This is the first he's heard of the psychology of human-animal interactions,

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and there is such a thing.

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So welcome, Armour.

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Yeah, I will be playing the role of the resident animal in this case.

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So the listeners will get the showcase of the human-animal interaction as they

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listen to this podcast.

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Thanks for having me.

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Always great to have you.

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So, Chris, let's start with what do we even mean by psychology of human-animal interactions?

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What are we talking about here?

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Humans can think about animals as non-human animals in a variety of different ways.

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One extreme would be a view that non-human animals are there for humans to use as

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they please without considering the rights or well-being of those animals.

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The other extreme would be that

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nonhumans deserve the same moral consideration as humans do.

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And so anything that you would not feel appropriate to do to another human,

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you should also not feel appropriate to do with another nonhuman.

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And generally speaking, our group, our society takes the latter view.

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I think there's probably very few people who would say that nonhumans deserve

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exactly the same level of consideration as humans.

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So for example, if you had the choice of either

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If you must kill either a pig or a human,

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I think nearly everybody would choose to kill the pig rather than the human.

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But from our perspective,

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one should do that with very serious reservation,

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given that we know that pigs feel pain,

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that they have attachment bonds with their loved ones,

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and that therefore they deserve some consideration.

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The psychology of human-animal intergroup relations has to do with,

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you know,

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how do people think about that?

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How do people vary?

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Why do they vary?

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Can that change?

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How does that lead to behavior such as dietary behavior,

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the choice to be vegan,

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for example,

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etc.?

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?

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that that's cool when you were talking the first thing which came to mind was this

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meme have you ever seen it online which is like where do we draw the line of pet

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versus food and it's and it's like cats dogs blah blah blah and it goes all the way

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to chickens that's just a line of animals it's like where do you draw the line

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This is really interesting because there's like cultural differences, right?

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In some cultures,

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what are considered pets or pests in one place are considered food in another,

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or what's considered a pet in one place is considered a pest,

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or what's considered food in one place is considered sacred.

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Yeah.

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for example, in Hinduism or is considered haram in Islam.

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So there's clear cultural differences,

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which really speak to the kind of arbitrariness of how we deal with nonhumans.

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Several of the books kind of on this topic are titled along those lines of like,

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what's the difference between a pest,

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a pet and food?

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And mostly it comes down to human utility, right?

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Like dogs are often pets because dogs make good pets.

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They want to please humans and

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Generally speaking,

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we've been getting along with them for 10,000 years or whatever,

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whereas cows are oftentimes treated as food just because there's kind of a habit of

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doing that and they're kind of easy to corral and they're large,

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et cetera.

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So,

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yeah,

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to me,

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this kind of speaks to the arbitrary of the issue because from the perspective of

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sentience,

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that is the capacity of animals to feel pain or to...

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have relationships with one another to sort of share some of the cognitive

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abilities with humans.

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The difference between say a pig and a dog is really difficult to identify.

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The only real difference has to do with utility from a human perspective.

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So in terms of defining how these relationships... Sorry, let me rephrase that.

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In terms of talking about how these relationships are defined,

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what are some of the factors which are taken into consideration before determining,

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say,

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the relationship between a human and a dog and a human and a pig?

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Yeah.

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Because there's naturally a scale.

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Yeah, I mean, well, you know, we've already talked about culture.

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Culture is one important factor.

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Generally speaking,

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people treat nonhumans the same way other people within their own culture do.

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So if the majority of the population accepts the idea that cows are food,

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then the sort of baseline,

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the default is for other people to accept that.

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And where I live, that's a common kind of assumption.

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um so that means you have to kind of challenge oftentimes a social norm in order to

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think otherwise or to behave in a way that's not consistent with that we study

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motivations that are more individual so there's a variety of different motivations

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um both to justify treating animals in a certain way and mostly we focus on diet

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because that's that's one way in which humans interact with a variety of different

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animals on a daily basis you know often multiple times per day either choosing to

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eat them or to not eat them or to eat their byproducts their

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eggs or their dairy or whatever, honey, etc.

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So we sort of focus on individual level motivations to eat or not eat animals and

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animal products.

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And we find that there's a variety of motivations,

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both to do those things and not to do those things.

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So for example, reasons people give, if you ask a person like, why do you eat animals?

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they'll usually give one of four responses.

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These are called the four Ns.

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And the four Ns are that it's natural, that this is something that is part of a sort of

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the world order,

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that humans are sort of designed to eat animals,

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that it's necessary that to not eat animals would risk health problems,

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and to eat animals makes you healthier,

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that it's normal,

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everyone else does it,

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and so that can be a moral justification for some people,

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and that it's nice,

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that it tastes good.

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So those are the four Ns,

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and usually if you just ask a person open-ended,

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like,

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why do you do that,

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typically they'll give one of those four answers,

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and then if you challenge that one,

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they'll give a different one,

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et cetera.

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The most common reasons people give not to eat animals,

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the first one is health,

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which is interesting because people use health as both the reason to eat animals

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and a reason not to eat animals.

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It turns out that on average, both people are wrong.

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It's not necessarily healthy to eat animals and it's not all that healthy not to eat animals.

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You can go wrong in both directions.

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And so that's not a particularly good reason either way,

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but it's one of the more common reasons people give for both,

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eating and not eating animals.

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The second is environment.

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So we know that one of the major individual predictors of climate change is animal agriculture.

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And so not consuming animals is one of the best ways you can not play a role in climate change.

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The third is animal rights.

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This is the most common reason given among vegans.

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This is the one that's sort of inarguable.

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It's very difficult to imagine how you could grant somebody rights and also keep

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them captive,

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kill them and eat them at the same time.

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There's other sort of less common motivations that we study, too.

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So the pandemic raised...

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raised knowledge about the fact that the main reason we have pandemics typically,

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it's sort of controversial with regard to COVID,

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but with SARS and bird flu and the swine flu,

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et cetera,

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those all come from animal agriculture and particularly the use of antibiotics in

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animal agriculture to increase zoonotic disease risk.

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Workers' rights,

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it's pretty well established that people in the animal agriculture industry have

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among the worst rights across the world.

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Oftentimes, you don't choose to work in a slaughterhouse if you have other options, typically.

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Disgust, this is a motivation that typically develops after a person has stopped eating animals.

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In fact,

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it's a pretty common effect that if you've not eaten animals for some time,

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the idea of doing so becomes kind of disgusting.

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So there's other kinds of reasons,

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but I'm sort of interested,

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I'm a personality psychologist and a clinical psychologist by training.

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And so my sort of core interest is why are people different from one another?

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So I think about how to apply that question to this topic of like,

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what are the reasons that people have to eat or not to eat animals?

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And, you know, there's both differences across people.

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So your profile of reasons might be different than mine or someone else's,

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but there's also interesting differences across time within a person.

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So your reasons,

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To eat or not eat animals might change over the course of your own life.

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Certainly that's been the case for me.

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So if we take you as the example, how have your sort of reasons changed over time?

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Because you said that they do or can do for pupils.

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Yeah, so I grew up in a rural community in North America.

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Most of my family were hunters and farmers, often animal farmers.

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So I come from a cultural background which strongly emphasizes the importance of eating animals.

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Every time I go home, my parents are trying to make my kids eat animals.

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And so there's kind of an interesting challenge for me personally.

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I think I've always been kind of an animal lover,

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I guess,

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and a sort of a sympathetic person in general.

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And I had a favorite band in my youth who had a song called Meet His Murder.

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And when I heard that song, it was sort of convincing and a light bulb kind of went off.

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I was into that band around the same time that my parents were teaching me how to

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use guns and how to hunt.

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So there's a real kind of like,

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dialectic happening in my head of how do I square these two things?

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And I just sort of decided like what feels right to me has to do with like,

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it doesn't feel right for me to kill animals.

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I think because of my cultural background, I also can,

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can get why people do, like from my cultural background, why people do that.

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And so I distinguish,

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for example,

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sort of the passive participation in animal agriculture from something like hunting

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or farming of small family farms.

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Small family farms and hunting aren't for me,

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but to me,

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this is easier to justify morally than eating at McDonald's and pretending like

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nothing happened.

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But, you know, over time, I kind of went back and forth.

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I think the animal rights issue has always been the core.

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At that time, of course, I wasn't aware at all of climate change as an important factor.

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This was the 90s and people were talking about it,

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but I don't think I or many people had made the connection to animal agriculture at

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that point.

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Mostly we talked about like fossil fuels.

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And there was a time in my young adulthood where I sort of thought,

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oh,

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maybe I'm just kind of being weird or trying to set myself apart for a while.

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So I kind of went back.

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And and eight animals for a little while.

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And it just never really felt right.

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So then I stopped again.

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So I think that was kind of the normal motivation.

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So, like, you know, everyone else is kind of doing this.

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Why do I have to stand out and set myself apart?

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I think I was I had this kind of weird idea that,

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like,

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to be an adult,

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you have to give rid of idealism or something like that.

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But it never really felt right.

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So up until when I was in college for a while,

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I played around with veganism and I was vegan for about a year or two.

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And then I did a study abroad in Zimbabwe where I didn't really have access to

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nutritious vegan food and actually got kind of sick.

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I had some vitamin deficiencies.

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And so then I thought, oh, I really should be eating vegan.

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dairy at least.

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And so I started doing that.

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And then it took me until maybe 10 more years where I really,

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you know,

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every time I would eat,

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drink milk or eat yogurt or eat an egg or whatever,

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I just didn't feel good.

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It just felt like I was doing something I didn't, that I didn't approve of.

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it's not quite as bad as like cheating on your spouse,

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but maybe a similar kind of feeling of like you do it and maybe it feels okay at

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the time,

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but then afterwards you're like,

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that just doesn't feel right.

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So to me,

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it's just a matter of like,

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I don't want to have to go around feeling bad about the things that I do.

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And so it's just a much easier life for me to not do that.

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And I think the consequence on the backend is

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You know,

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when I look at a non-human,

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I just see someone who has the same rights as maybe a human stranger.

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So it's not that I'm necessarily going out of my way to try to help someone that I've never met.

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On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't want to do anything to hurt them.

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So when I think about a cow that I've never met, I have the same idea.

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Like, this cow lives their life.

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They love their loved ones.

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Why would I want to do something that would harm them?

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Yeah.

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From your story of how you went back and forth,

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when you mentioned your time in Zimbabwe,

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one of the issues you were facing was the availability of vegan diet food.

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So from there,

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just sort of moving from that road,

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were there any answers from you asking people about in terms of why they eat meat?

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Was there anything about, well, that's what's available or that's what's affordable?

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Because in some places, a vegan diet may not be like stuff like almond milk and oat milk.

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And,

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you know,

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this plethora of vegan options aren't as economically available in some places as

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opposed to meat options.

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And this may be a small area,

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though,

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because you generally non-vegetarian foods are far more expensive,

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meats and stuff.

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especially today.

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It depends on where.

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There's certainly plenty of places in the world where high-quality plant-based food

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is not available for market-based reasons and other kinds of cultural reasons,

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etc.

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Even here in Switzerland, which is one of the wealthiest countries in the world,

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who's fairly politically progressive, not necessarily left.

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But if you go to the countryside, it's a pretty cheese-based society.

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So it can be pretty hard to find plant-based foods even here.

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So you have to throw some nuts in your backpack if you go traveling or whatever,

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just to be sure you're going to have something to eat.

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So,

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yeah,

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I mean,

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there's other places where it's particularly difficult to get nutritious food.

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And, you know, if you don't eat animals, you do risk certain kinds of vitamin deficiencies.

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So vitamin B12 and vitamin D and certain fatty acids,

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you know,

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you got to,

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you know,

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I get my blood tested and make sure that I'm getting that stuff.

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And that's kind of the responsible way to do that.

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Yeah.

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But this is a huge factor.

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Both the availability is one issue.

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The cost is a separate issue.

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Animal agriculture is subsidized in most parts of the world.

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And so animal-based food is much cheaper than it would be if the costs were only

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based on the market.

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And conversely, plant-based proteins often are not subsidized.

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So if that were equalized, I think that would shift this issue around a lot.

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There's potential.

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I mean, there's certainly a lot more plant-based proteins now than there were even 10 years ago.

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There's also a big potential for things like cell-based meat.

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Right now, the status of that is like people sort of

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tend to have a kind of disgust response or have a negative response to the idea of

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cell-based meat.

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But as that becomes more normal,

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more on the market,

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I would anticipate that this becomes a popular option.

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And if the market were fair,

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that is if animal agriculture were not subsidized,

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but there's a huge lobby for animal agriculture,

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but if that were fair and cell-based meat were cheaper than meat that comes from

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animals,

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my suspicion would be that many people would choose it.

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I mean,

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I guess on the cell-based meat thing,

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it would be,

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it would over time be cheaper to produce as well.

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So I guess it'd be more economically efficient just in general, wouldn't it?

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But, so this was good talking about... Yeah, all you need is a stem cell in a lab.

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Like, I don't know much about the technology there, but... I mean...

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I imagine you've also spoken with people who've actively voiced an opposition to,

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against impossible meats and things like that,

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because,

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oh,

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they don't taste like real meat and stuff.

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Right.

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So what's, is there any sort of, what,

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well, some scientific reason for, you know, them not being willing to accept?

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Or is it just sort of the bias of societal,

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just a social psychology of,

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you know,

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growing up around eating meat and knowing one's the real deal and therefore the

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other is not going to be up to standard and stuff like that?

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Yeah,

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I mean,

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there's a real strong bias among omnivores to be skeptical about plant-based

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proteins.

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You run into this often.

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Generally speaking, it's not all that effective to try to argue with people about this issue.

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People have their preferences.

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It is what it is.

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I myself also like the taste of meat.

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So to me, the more a plant-based product can taste like meat, the more I tend to like it.

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Many vegans don't feel that way,

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but there's an interesting kind of related question or line of research about the

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meat paradox.

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The meat paradox is based on the concept of cognitive dissonance.

(00:19:07):
And in cognitive dissonance,

(00:19:08):
the idea is that you have a belief and a behavior that don't line up with each

(00:19:11):
other.

(00:19:12):
So I know that animals are sentient.

(00:19:14):
I know that if you kill a sentient being, you've done some kind of ethical transgression.

(00:19:19):
But I like the taste of hamburger.

(00:19:23):
And so the question is,

(00:19:24):
what do you do when you have a behavior that doesn't line up with your belief

(00:19:29):
system?

(00:19:31):
And the simple way to handle that would be to change your behavior.

(00:19:34):
But of course, changing behavior that you like is...

(00:19:38):
difficult to do, many people don't wanna do it.

(00:19:41):
So usually what people do is instead they kind of rationalize the behavior instead,

(00:19:44):
they kind of explain it away.

(00:19:45):
Well,

(00:19:46):
you can never make plant-based food taste as good as meat or I need it for the

(00:19:49):
health even though that's not true or et cetera.

(00:19:52):
So there's been interesting studies

(00:19:56):
about this where,

(00:19:57):
for example,

(00:19:59):
so you'll randomize people to either have a plant-based burger or a meat-based

(00:20:04):
burger.

(00:20:04):
And then after that, you will ask people, like, how intelligent do you think are cows?

(00:20:10):
How much do you think cows can feel pain, et cetera?

(00:20:13):
And the people who eat the meat-based burger are more likely to say that animals

(00:20:17):
are not sentient and are not intelligent.

(00:20:19):
Now,

(00:20:19):
of course,

(00:20:20):
there's nothing that actually happened that could have changed their opinion about

(00:20:24):
that.

(00:20:26):
And so the explanation must be that having just eaten one,

(00:20:30):
you have to kind of convince yourself that it was okay to do that by saying that

(00:20:34):
the cow didn't feel anything or whatever.

(00:20:41):
I would go the other way, being like, oh, this cow must be smart.

(00:20:45):
That's why I feel smart now that I've eaten it.

(00:20:47):
I mean, I think if you were eating humans, this would be a good argument.

(00:20:52):
Hmm.

(00:20:53):
Fair enough.

(00:20:53):
My sense brain must go for heaps then.

(00:20:58):
To be clear,

(00:20:59):
I think there's other reasons not to eat humans,

(00:21:00):
but I mean,

(00:21:01):
if this was what you were doing,

(00:21:03):
I think you could say,

(00:21:03):
well,

(00:21:03):
I outsmarted this person who's in the same species as me,

(00:21:06):
then maybe on some level you could feel proud of that.

(00:21:09):
Well,

(00:21:10):
the sentience argument is a very,

(00:21:12):
well,

(00:21:13):
the human-animal line is a very interesting one where the sentience argument comes

(00:21:17):
in because at what point do you start treating other humans as animals,

(00:21:21):
right?

(00:21:22):
For the same argument being like, they're different to us.

(00:21:25):
Because you can just take that plan a bit further.

(00:21:28):
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of research.

(00:21:30):
One of the papers that we published in our journal had to do with this,

(00:21:34):
and it basically asked the question,

(00:21:35):
are people who are racist or homophobic or sexist,

(00:21:39):
et cetera,

(00:21:40):
are they also more likely to be what we call speciesist,

(00:21:43):
where speciesist is the kind of person who tends to really rank animals in a kind

(00:21:47):
of hierarchical way rather than see them as sort of all deserving similar moral

(00:21:51):
consideration?

(00:21:51):
There's pretty strong evidence that people who are racist also are more likely to be speciesist.

(00:21:57):
So

(00:21:59):
From our perspective,

(00:22:00):
this is probably all part of one kind of common phenomenon,

(00:22:03):
a sort of social dominance kind of phenomenon where you just think,

(00:22:07):
well,

(00:22:08):
certain kinds of people or people in my in-group or people like me are kind of

(00:22:12):
better,

(00:22:13):
deserve more and more consideration than anybody else is kind of lesser than.

(00:22:17):
And it's just a question of like, where do you draw those lines?

(00:22:20):
It could be about sexual orientation or it could be about gender or it could be

(00:22:24):
about race,

(00:22:25):
cultural background,

(00:22:26):
religion,

(00:22:26):
species,

(00:22:27):
et cetera.

(00:22:31):
So I had one question.

(00:22:32):
So nowadays,

(00:22:34):
there's a lot of ethical arguments around the sentience of AI and how that could

(00:22:41):
come around in the near future.

(00:22:43):
And plenty of conversations around how to define that and how to go about it.

(00:22:48):
How has that discussion influenced the discussion between the sentience of animals

(00:22:55):
and the non-human animal relationship?

(00:22:59):
Yeah,

(00:22:59):
that's not really my area,

(00:23:00):
but certainly people who study the philosophy of veganism are really interested.

(00:23:05):
There's a lot of overlap there because in both cases,

(00:23:07):
you have a kind of case of like,

(00:23:09):
how do we think about moral consideration of something that's not part of our

(00:23:13):
species?

(00:23:13):
Whether that's a,

(00:23:15):
if we really believe that AIs were sentient,

(00:23:17):
and so far as I know,

(00:23:18):
that's never happened yet,

(00:23:19):
but there is this kind of potential that it could happen.

(00:23:21):
If that were to happen, what would it mean for us?

(00:23:25):
And, you know,

(00:23:26):
Right now,

(00:23:26):
the vast majority of humans don't really care that much about any,

(00:23:30):
even humans,

(00:23:30):
let alone non-human animals,

(00:23:32):
let alone AI.

(00:23:33):
So I'm not really sure what would happen.

(00:23:35):
But if you did take sort of this moral viewpoint seriously,

(00:23:39):
you would have to think very carefully about how you treat humans.

(00:23:43):
AI.

(00:23:44):
I heard a podcast once where there was this kind of nightmare scenario where an

(00:23:48):
evil dictator bred billions and billions of sentient AIs and then threatened to

(00:23:54):
torture them until they got what they want.

(00:23:56):
So this can go in many different directions.

(00:23:59):
One wonders, would humans even care about these billions of AI?

(00:24:04):
It's kind of abstract to think about what does it mean for

(00:24:08):
you know, microchips to feel pain.

(00:24:10):
But if you were really convinced,

(00:24:12):
you know,

(00:24:12):
that AI was sentient and there were many,

(00:24:15):
you know,

(00:24:15):
AI out there,

(00:24:17):
agents out there who were sentient,

(00:24:20):
to my mind,

(00:24:21):
that would have really important consequences for how we treat AI.

(00:24:24):
It would change the whole mail-order-bride industry.

(00:24:30):
Yeah.

(00:24:30):
Totally.

(00:24:32):
Uh,

(00:24:32):
let's talk about the journal because you mentioned it a couple of times,

(00:24:36):
but so if you could tell us what the journal is to your chief editor of,

(00:24:40):
and then we can go and talk about it further.

(00:24:44):
Yeah, so I'm just going to back up a smidge.

(00:24:47):
It starts with the society, really.

(00:24:48):
The society is called the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations.

(00:24:53):
This is a society that started with myself,

(00:24:56):
Jared Piazza,

(00:24:58):
and Christoph Doont,

(00:24:59):
both scholars in the United Kingdom.

(00:25:00):
So we got together and we sort of observed like there's a lot of young people doing

(00:25:07):
research in this space,

(00:25:08):
but there's not a lot of...

(00:25:09):
outlets either in terms of conferences or journals.

(00:25:13):
So like a lot of people doing work in this area,

(00:25:15):
we're publishing in like diet journals or in general social psychology journals.

(00:25:21):
And there wasn't any intellectual space really devoted to this perspective.

(00:25:27):
There were a few.

(00:25:28):
That's not totally fair, but we felt like there was room for more.

(00:25:31):
Let me put it that way.

(00:25:32):
So we started with some sort of talk series and we just tried to sort of gauge enthusiasm.

(00:25:38):
We've got a pretty big response.

(00:25:39):
A lot of people showed up for the talks, really interested.

(00:25:41):
We had a conference that was well attended.

(00:25:43):
And then we're really lucky that...

(00:25:46):
The SiteGold Open Program,

(00:25:47):
which is sponsored by the Leibniz Institute in Germany,

(00:25:51):
sponsored our journal.

(00:25:52):
So what's useful about that is this is a public institution, so it's funded by taxpayers.

(00:25:59):
And what that means is that it's both free to publish in, but it's also fully open access.

(00:26:04):
And so, yeah, they sponsored our journal.

(00:26:08):
And I think we're the only journal that's really focused on this issue from an

(00:26:11):
explicitly social justice point of view,

(00:26:14):
which is also a fully scientific journal.

(00:26:16):
So our sort of focus or the scope of the journal is on rigorous empirical research,

(00:26:23):
but which comes from an explicitly social justice,

(00:26:27):
non-speciesist point of view.

(00:26:29):
And we've been around for a few years now, three years.

(00:26:32):
We've published 20 or so papers.

(00:26:36):
So far, I think the quality of the papers is very high.

(00:26:39):
And I'm really happy with the success.

(00:26:40):
We continue to get submissions and the papers continue to get better.

(00:26:43):
Nice.

(00:26:47):
Is there a sort of bias thing?

(00:26:49):
I don't know how it works necessarily in journals,

(00:26:51):
but is there this sort of bias concern if you say we're coming from a social

(00:26:55):
justice point of view?

(00:26:57):
Is that such a thing which exists?

(00:26:58):
I don't know.

(00:27:00):
This is a real concern for us.

(00:27:03):
The way I look at this is that

(00:27:06):
This kind of thought comes to a person's mind like it did to yours,

(00:27:10):
mostly because we have a non-majority point of view.

(00:27:15):
So for example,

(00:27:16):
if I said to you,

(00:27:16):
well,

(00:27:16):
I'm a suicide researcher and I study suicide,

(00:27:19):
it wouldn't be surprising at all if the kind of position of the journal was suicide

(00:27:23):
is generally a bad thing.

(00:27:25):
We should generally be doing research to try to figure out how to prevent it or how

(00:27:29):
to help people who are thinking about suicide.

(00:27:31):
And everyone would kind of agree that like having a moral stance about that is acceptable.

(00:27:34):
Accept assisted dying.

(00:27:36):
Again, then.

(00:27:37):
Well, yeah, there's nuance there too.

(00:27:39):
You could use schizophrenia as an example.

(00:27:41):
And even there you could find probably people who would say, well, human variation is okay.

(00:27:45):
If a person has psychotic disorder, that's not necessarily bad.

(00:27:49):
But generally speaking,

(00:27:50):
you know,

(00:27:50):
there are these topics where people think,

(00:27:52):
well,

(00:27:52):
we can all agree like that's better than that.

(00:27:55):
And so it's okay for a journal to take that stance explicitly.

(00:27:59):
That's just kind of how we, we felt like it was important to just be transparent.

(00:28:02):
Like, um,

(00:28:06):
I would be open to the idea of a person publishing a paper in our journal that took

(00:28:11):
an explicitly speciesist point of view that said,

(00:28:15):
like,

(00:28:16):
here's why we think it's okay to treat animals as tools or as food or whatever.

(00:28:22):
I would certainly be open,

(00:28:24):
because we're a scientific journal,

(00:28:25):
I'm certainly open to the possibility that some of the findings that people report

(00:28:29):
and studies report in our journal don't necessarily support the narrative that we

(00:28:32):
like best.

(00:28:33):
I think there's some useful ways in which we should do that more often.

(00:28:39):
um but we thought it was kind of important to just be explicit and say like look

(00:28:42):
our our sort of philosophical position as a society and as a journal is that the

(00:28:47):
world is too speciesist and we're interested in how to try to make it less so and

(00:28:52):
we're interested in the science about about that i mean i guess the whole point is

(00:28:59):
that if it passes sort of scientific rigor if if it's if you do a study and the

(00:29:04):
outcomes even if they are not what you're expecting but you've

(00:29:07):
but they hold up,

(00:29:09):
scientifically speaking,

(00:29:09):
like there's not big methodological flaws,

(00:29:12):
then it's completely like,

(00:29:13):
yeah,

(00:29:15):
fine.

(00:29:16):
That's kind of our take.

(00:29:17):
So one thing we did to address this concern is we have an ombudsperson team.

(00:29:22):
So this is a group of six people who are good scholars but have no interest in this

(00:29:27):
topic,

(00:29:28):
who I just sort of respected their scholarship in general.

(00:29:31):
And they just issued a report actually a couple months ago

(00:29:35):
what I asked them to do is to go through all the papers we've published so far and

(00:29:38):
to try to identify any areas of bias or of going beyond the data to make a kind of

(00:29:45):
polemical point.

(00:29:48):
And they basically found that we don't do that any more than any other journal does.

(00:29:53):
So I was really happy to see their report.

(00:29:55):
So yeah, that to me is the critical difference is that

(00:29:58):
The scientific rigor piece is really critical.

(00:30:01):
It's not an advocacy journal.

(00:30:03):
I have nothing against advocacy.

(00:30:04):
I'm glad advocates exist, but that's not what we're trying to do.

(00:30:07):
We're trying to be a scientific journal.

(00:30:09):
And that's what the Ombudsman team was really put in place to try to judge because

(00:30:15):
you never see your own blind spots by definition.

(00:30:19):
So I didn't feel like we,

(00:30:20):
from the inside,

(00:30:20):
were really in a good position to evaluate our own work in terms of bias.

(00:30:24):
And so I was pleased to see that the OnBuds people also didn't see any bias.

(00:30:29):
Nice.

(00:30:30):
That's really cool.

(00:30:34):
So then I guess my next question would be,

(00:30:36):
you said you published,

(00:30:37):
so it started for three years,

(00:30:38):
you published about 20 odd articles.

(00:30:41):
What ones have stood out to you so far in terms of?

(00:30:45):
Yeah, all of them are good.

(00:30:47):
This is like, what's your favorite child in a way?

(00:30:50):
I've got three of them.

(00:30:51):
And so I don't know.

(00:30:52):
If I had to answer this question in front of them, it would be challenging.

(00:30:56):
My brother and I both know that parents are favorites.

(00:31:00):
I mean, I do have a favorite.

(00:31:02):
I just will never tell you or anybody else who that is.

(00:31:04):
And they change over time.

(00:31:05):
But...

(00:31:09):
I just picked a couple that I thought might be interesting for you to hear about.

(00:31:12):
I picked three, but we don't have to talk about them all.

(00:31:14):
One of them was published,

(00:31:16):
I think,

(00:31:16):
last year by Stefan Leach and Christophe Doont,

(00:31:20):
who are in the UK.

(00:31:21):
And that had to do with how people use language.

(00:31:24):
So one of the first things I noticed about my wife is that she calls non-humans people.

(00:31:31):
And I thought this was kind of cute.

(00:31:32):
And I do that too.

(00:31:33):
I did that before, we both did that before we met.

(00:31:35):
And this was kind of one of these things of like,

(00:31:36):
you notice this thing in another person that sort of,

(00:31:40):
turns you on or whatever,

(00:31:41):
not sexually,

(00:31:42):
but,

(00:31:42):
you know,

(00:31:42):
like,

(00:31:42):
is that,

(00:31:42):
oh,

(00:31:43):
this is a shared value.

(00:31:44):
This is like, oh, we kind of get on together.

(00:31:46):
So they studied this, Stefan and Christophe.

(00:31:50):
And so,

(00:31:51):
you know,

(00:31:51):
you could call a pig a person or you could call them someone or you could call them

(00:31:55):
something.

(00:31:56):
And that use of those words really says a lot about how you think about that pig.

(00:32:03):
Is it a thing that you can use or is it a person who deserves to be treated as such?

(00:32:08):
And so they did three studies, all of them in the UK with about 1,500 people.

(00:32:13):
And they asked people to think about like,

(00:32:15):
well,

(00:32:16):
how would you think about somebody who calls,

(00:32:18):
say,

(00:32:18):
a pig or a cow or a dog or whatever,

(00:32:20):
something rather than someone?

(00:32:22):
And they had really interesting results.

(00:32:24):
Basically, people who eat animals or even semi-vegetarians have

(00:32:30):
didn't really like the use of non-speciesist language.

(00:32:33):
They sort of saw that as maybe arrogant or weird or whatever,

(00:32:38):
whereas strict vegetarians and vegans saw that more positively.

(00:32:41):
They sort of thought that this connotes compassion,

(00:32:45):
that this is a person who's clearly thought about the ethical implications of the

(00:32:48):
relationship they have with

(00:32:50):
that other.

(00:32:54):
Both groups sort of were clearly able to predict that a person who uses that

(00:32:59):
language is less likely to eat a person.

(00:33:01):
So everyone kind of knows that this is a code for behavior, right?

(00:33:04):
That if you're calling a pig a person, that probably means you're not eating them.

(00:33:08):
But I think at the deeper level,

(00:33:09):
it sort of speaks to the moral context of human and animal intergroup relations,

(00:33:14):
how that manifests in language.

(00:33:15):
There's,

(00:33:16):
of course,

(00:33:16):
a lot of examples in the history of various social justice movements about how

(00:33:21):
changing the words that we use to describe groups of people really is important for

(00:33:25):
thinking about those people as having equal standing.

(00:33:30):
It's also,

(00:33:30):
I think,

(00:33:30):
interesting because the results are sort of nuanced from a practical point of view.

(00:33:34):
The sort of positive piece is that it sort of highlights that if you could help

(00:33:40):
people change the language,

(00:33:41):
it might also help people change their behavior.

(00:33:43):
If it became more of a norm to call non-humans people,

(00:33:47):
probably it would become less of a norm to eat non-humans.

(00:33:51):
On the other hand,

(00:33:52):
it's one of these examples of how many people find vegans annoying because they're

(00:33:57):
like moralistic do-gooders who go around judging everyone else.

(00:34:00):
And this also becomes a code for like,

(00:34:02):
oh,

(00:34:02):
if you call a pig a person,

(00:34:04):
you're just like one of those people.

(00:34:06):
So this is always the double-edged sword in this space for people like doing advocacy.

(00:34:11):
If on the one hand, you want to try to push things in a certain direction.

(00:34:15):
On the other hand, the more you push, the more you kind of get this pushback.

(00:34:19):
And so I thought that was kind of a cool paper.

(00:34:24):
Another one was sort of... Oh, go ahead.

(00:34:27):
Sorry.

(00:34:27):
On this paper,

(00:34:30):
were they specifically asking about animals that are typically used for consumption

(00:34:36):
or did they also ask about,

(00:34:38):
say,

(00:34:39):
domesticated animals?

(00:34:40):
Because I have a feeling, I'm not sure whether this will be the case or not, but

(00:34:48):
people who have a lot of pets would certainly be more inclined to refer to animals

(00:34:56):
as a person rather than a thing,

(00:35:00):
right?

(00:35:00):
Yeah.

(00:35:01):
Or is that just...

(00:35:03):
Just in my head.

(00:35:05):
I don't remember that.

(00:35:06):
I don't think that they tested this hypothesis that like the more pets you have,

(00:35:10):
the more likely you're to do that.

(00:35:11):
They focused on diet.

(00:35:13):
And,

(00:35:13):
you know,

(00:35:14):
is it the case that the more likely you are to eat animals,

(00:35:17):
does that change the way you see other people who would use these different kinds

(00:35:20):
of languages?

(00:35:21):
It's interesting.

(00:35:22):
This prediction,

(00:35:25):
it's a testable hypothesis that the more pets you have,

(00:35:27):
the more likely you are to use non-speciesist language.

(00:35:30):
There was another study by Jared Piazza and Chloe.

(00:35:36):
I'm forgetting her name.

(00:35:37):
This is not one that's in my notes because I didn't expect to talk about it.

(00:35:40):
But they studied...

(00:35:42):
I'm probably going to get the details wrong because I didn't prepare for this.

(00:35:45):
But they basically studied farmers and non-farmers in terms of attitudes about animals.

(00:35:50):
And surprisingly,

(00:35:51):
they didn't find much of a difference in terms of attitudes about sentience,

(00:35:54):
et cetera.

(00:35:55):
So...

(00:35:58):
So this is an interesting question, right?

(00:36:00):
Because there's both the language that we use and there's the various ways in which

(00:36:03):
you can engage with nonhumans.

(00:36:05):
You can engage with them as a farmer.

(00:36:07):
You can engage with them as a consumer.

(00:36:09):
You can engage with them as an advocate,

(00:36:10):
as a pet owner or owner is not a word that I typically would use,

(00:36:16):
but as a sort of pet parent or whatever.

(00:36:20):
And these kinds of interactions are very likely to affect how you think about animals.

(00:36:26):
I think the pet issue is interesting because humans seem to find it so easy to

(00:36:30):
categorize non-humans according to their utility,

(00:36:34):
as I was talking about before.

(00:36:35):
So it seems entirely possible that a pet owner can still leave room in their head

(00:36:41):
for treating dogs one way and pigs a completely different way based on their

(00:36:45):
utility.

(00:36:45):
Yeah.

(00:36:48):
Well,

(00:36:48):
yeah,

(00:36:48):
I was thinking,

(00:36:49):
like,

(00:36:49):
how Amur had mentioned about the words of...

(00:36:52):
Because I would think that,

(00:36:55):
like,

(00:36:55):
there was a dog which just walked past over there.

(00:36:58):
And I'd be like, oh, she's walking, oh, she's so cute.

(00:37:01):
But is that the same as using person, assigning personhood?

(00:37:08):
Or is that different to what you were measuring when you say language?

(00:37:11):
Yeah.

(00:37:13):
Because,

(00:37:14):
yeah,

(00:37:14):
I was trying to think of the linguistic boundaries of what you consider addressing

(00:37:18):
someone as a person versus not.

(00:37:22):
Yeah, linguists would probably parse this in a way that's slightly more careful.

(00:37:25):
I mean,

(00:37:25):
oftentimes people refer to babies as it before they're born also,

(00:37:29):
like human babies as it.

(00:37:31):
And I think just because like dog,

(00:37:34):
frankly,

(00:37:34):
dog genitals are so easy to see that we usually use he or she to refer to dogs.

(00:37:40):
That doesn't necessarily mean that we're granting them personhood in the same way

(00:37:43):
this paper was kind of getting at.

(00:37:45):
So I think in this paper,

(00:37:46):
they focused on someone or something because that's a real clear difference.

(00:37:53):
But yeah,

(00:37:53):
I mean,

(00:37:53):
there's probably some boundary areas where the language doesn't quite line up to

(00:37:58):
attitudes about personhood and moral consideration,

(00:38:00):
et cetera.

(00:38:04):
I'm also thinking on a cultural level.

(00:38:05):
I've seen so many people in India, highest vegetarian population in the world.

(00:38:10):
Oh my God, how we can hate on people.

(00:38:12):
like animals, like street dogs and stuff.

(00:38:15):
So we don't necessarily, we would definitely not be referring to them as human.

(00:38:20):
If you think of it that way.

(00:38:23):
And so how does,

(00:38:24):
so then my question is,

(00:38:26):
how does this sort of class into the idea of assigning personhood with your diet,

(00:38:35):
where you,

(00:38:36):
where sort of culturally you're probably vegetarian,

(00:38:38):
vegan,

(00:38:40):
But then you're still probably speciesist, as in you still acknowledge that that's not human.

(00:38:46):
kind of thing yeah totally i mean i think i mean to be honest we're all sort of

(00:38:49):
speciesist like you know mosquitoes for example there's very few people who like

(00:38:54):
mosquitoes even sort of vegans um and you know we could argue about the best way to

(00:38:59):
deal with mosquitoes like is there a way to control them without killing them um

(00:39:03):
but very people are like you know my favorite species is mosquito um so yeah

(00:39:13):
And frankly, you know, I don't think you have to like humans either.

(00:39:15):
So it's sort of a different question of like,

(00:39:18):
do you like members of the species relative to,

(00:39:21):
do you think members of the species deserve moral consideration?

(00:39:26):
Right?

(00:39:28):
Yeah, no, no, that makes sense.

(00:39:33):
So back, sorry, I think we should go back to the journal because you're mentioning paper.

(00:39:37):
You're just about to start on paper number two you wanted to talk about.

(00:39:41):
Oh, yeah.

(00:39:41):
Well, I mean, sorry, I've ended the sort of first narrative with implications for advocacy.

(00:39:47):
There was another paper that was really focused on advocacy.

(00:39:51):
And this had to do with how to calibrate appeals.

(00:39:53):
So one strategy advocates often use is to say,

(00:39:56):
like,

(00:39:57):
for the next week,

(00:39:57):
could you stop eating animals?

(00:39:59):
Or for the next week, could you do this?

(00:40:00):
Or for the next month?

(00:40:01):
So we have things like Veganuary, et cetera.

(00:40:04):
where people are sort of requested or challenged to engage in certain kind of

(00:40:09):
behavior patterns for some limited period of time.

(00:40:13):
This was a study by Sophie Cameron and Bastien Jaeger and Maddie Wilkes.

(00:40:17):
And they compared in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia and the Netherlands,

(00:40:23):
they compared sort of different asks.

(00:40:26):
So do I ask you to completely eliminate meat from your diet?

(00:40:30):
Do I ask you to only not eat meat one day next week or one meal next week?

(00:40:35):
Or do I do something in the middle?

(00:40:37):
So they had this like range of appeals.

(00:40:39):
And the idea was like, if you ask somebody to only eliminate meat from one meal,

(00:40:45):
odds are they could do it, but it doesn't have very big impact.

(00:40:48):
On the other hand,

(00:40:49):
if you ask them to completely eliminate meat from their diet and were successful,

(00:40:52):
that would have a huge impact,

(00:40:54):
but most people aren't willing or able to do that,

(00:40:56):
right?

(00:40:56):
So the question is like,

(00:40:58):
where do you kind of,

(00:40:59):
where's the most effective way in terms of overall impact on the number of animal

(00:41:05):
lives?

(00:41:06):
And what they found,

(00:41:06):
and it generalized pretty well across all four countries,

(00:41:09):
was that mid-range requests were the most effective.

(00:41:11):
So that

(00:41:13):
Um,

(00:41:13):
you know,

(00:41:13):
around 40 to 70%,

(00:41:15):
it was their kind of range that if you ask people to cut their meat consumption in

(00:41:20):
half,

(00:41:21):
you get the best combination of people being willing to do it and having an impact

(00:41:25):
relative to asking them to cut out meat completely or asking them to only cut out

(00:41:29):
one meal during a certain period of time or whatever.

(00:41:32):
So I think this is really important because, um,

(00:41:37):
If you're a vegan and an advocate,

(00:41:39):
I think your philosophical position is that it's morally intolerable,

(00:41:43):
the idea that people are eating animals.

(00:41:45):
And therefore, you should only request or even insist that everyone stop doing that, right?

(00:41:55):
And there's a kind of debate in the field between what's called a kind of

(00:41:58):
utilitarian point of view,

(00:41:59):
which says the most important thing is to try to reduce the overall amount of

(00:42:03):
animal suffering.

(00:42:04):
And so whatever works for that is the best outcome.

(00:42:06):
And a more abolitionist point of view,

(00:42:08):
this is know that the goal should be complete elimination of animal agriculture or

(00:42:14):
any other kind of use of animals for human purposes.

(00:42:17):
And so this is a much more utilitarian kind of argument that says,

(00:42:20):
well,

(00:42:21):
you have to leave room in your head for the possibility that some people just

(00:42:25):
aren't going to do it or some people aren't going to be able to do what you would

(00:42:29):
like them to do.

(00:42:30):
But if you really calibrate what you're asking of people,

(00:42:33):
then you can kind of maximize the effectiveness.

(00:42:39):
I feel that was kind of intuitive though.

(00:42:43):
I feel just in general,

(00:42:45):
if you ask someone to do something completely,

(00:42:49):
which is changing their lifestyle a lot versus like small steps,

(00:42:53):
partial steps,

(00:42:53):
like manageable steps,

(00:42:56):
they're probably more likely or willing to do it.

(00:42:58):
I guess whenever I'm thinking about myself,

(00:43:00):
if I'm trying to change or develop a behavior,

(00:43:03):
it's about like doing something different.

(00:43:05):
in like small bites,

(00:43:06):
which I'm capable of doing and which won't make me run in the other direction.

(00:43:12):
So that way, I feel like this should have been sort of evident for advocates beforehand.

(00:43:18):
Yeah.

(00:43:19):
What was cool about, I agree with you, that is kind of evident.

(00:43:21):
I think the three things that are cool is number one,

(00:43:23):
they showed that the same kind of appeals work similarly across all four places.

(00:43:27):
Now, culturally, these places are not all that different from each other.

(00:43:30):
So maybe that's also kind of self-evident.

(00:43:33):
The other thing is that they were really able to specify the range of like,

(00:43:36):
well,

(00:43:36):
where,

(00:43:37):
and this is important for advocates because they can really use these numbers to

(00:43:40):
say like,

(00:43:41):
this is the number you should ask for,

(00:43:42):
not 80%,

(00:43:43):
not 20%,

(00:43:44):
right?

(00:43:46):
And then I think the third thing is they were,

(00:43:48):
the way that they analyzed their outcomes was by showing like,

(00:43:51):
what would be the actual impact on animal lives in that place,

(00:43:54):
right?

(00:43:55):
So they could kind of anchor their ask or their appeals to what the impact would be

(00:44:00):
in sort of a real world dependent variable.

(00:44:03):
But I agree.

(00:44:04):
I think this is kind of the utilitarian perspective,

(00:44:06):
the one that you just expressed of like,

(00:44:08):
you can't just go around asking people to make radical changes and complete changes

(00:44:12):
to their behavior and expect to be successful.

(00:44:16):
So it is very much on kind of that side.

(00:44:19):
Again, if you're an abolitionist, then you think, I don't really care how effective things are.

(00:44:25):
I'm not going to be part of an argument that says it's okay to do something that's

(00:44:29):
morally reprehensible,

(00:44:30):
even sometimes.

(00:44:32):
So that argument is much more kind of philosophical or moral,

(00:44:37):
whereas the utilitarian argument tends to be more practical.

(00:44:43):
I need some clarity on the sort of questions that you asked to the people in the

(00:44:50):
survey to get these results.

(00:44:52):
Was it sort of a bit of a bargaining sort of a situation where you first initially

(00:44:56):
asked,

(00:44:57):
oh,

(00:44:57):
would you be willing to cut out

(00:44:59):
meet completely and then sort of bargain down to say 40 percent 50 percent or was

(00:45:05):
it okay we're gonna ask people whether we cut out completely and it's not most of

(00:45:10):
them would probably say no and then you ask some other people whether we believe to

(00:45:15):
cut 40 percent and they were like yeah that's

(00:45:18):
something I'd be willing to do.

(00:45:19):
So how was it?

(00:45:21):
Yeah, it was between persons.

(00:45:23):
So some people got asked to eliminate meat completely.

(00:45:25):
Some people got asked to meet,

(00:45:27):
and they did it across this range of a percent or how much meat they would eat per

(00:45:33):
day or per week,

(00:45:34):
I think it was.

(00:45:35):
And then the outcome was their willingness to comply and then their report of

(00:45:39):
actual change over the course of that week.

(00:45:42):
Awesome.

(00:45:46):
Do you think if we did like a delayed discounting thing, we'd find similar results?

(00:45:50):
So,

(00:45:50):
you know,

(00:45:50):
that idea of keep giving them options and then keep giving a person options between

(00:45:55):
cut out meat or 80% of meat or cut out like 20% of meat from your diet and keep

(00:46:01):
like finding the ground.

(00:46:03):
Do you think we'd end up with the same sort of result more or less?

(00:46:08):
This would be my prediction.

(00:46:10):
As you say, I mean, it's kind of self-evident that you kind of have to find this sweet spot.

(00:46:16):
I think what this paper did nicely was articulate where that sweet spot is.

(00:46:20):
You know, how you then put this into practice is a question for advocates to figure out.

(00:46:25):
But I think this is really useful for them as a kind of starting place of...

(00:46:29):
You can go tell people, like, can you cut out meat completely from your diet?

(00:46:34):
This is a thing you can do.

(00:46:36):
But in terms of overall number of animals you've saved,

(00:46:39):
you'll be less effective if you do that than if you ask for a little bit less and

(00:46:44):
then maybe titrate up with those people.

(00:46:47):
Yeah.

(00:46:50):
Yeah, that's true.

(00:46:53):
All right.

(00:46:53):
What about the final paper?

(00:46:54):
Because you said you had three, which you had...

(00:46:57):
Yeah, this is one I think I've already mentioned.

(00:47:00):
This is by Bastian Yeager at Tilburg University.

(00:47:02):
This is a really cool study just because it was so well powered.

(00:47:05):
There's been previous studies like this before.

(00:47:07):
And it has to do with the link between devaluation of humans and the devaluation of nonhumans.

(00:47:13):
So Bastion did two studies.

(00:47:15):
One had 57,000 people from throughout Europe.

(00:47:19):
The other one had about 1,600 people from the Netherlands.

(00:47:22):
And in both cases, the test was fairly simple.

(00:47:24):
It was just if you have negative views about certain groups of nonhumans that tend

(00:47:29):
to be minoritized,

(00:47:31):
people from minority racial groups or religious groups or sexual orientations,

(00:47:35):
etc.,

(00:47:36):
are you also more likely to have prejudiced,

(00:47:38):
anti-speciesist views about nonhumans?

(00:47:42):
And he found that there was indeed robust correlations across different indicators

(00:47:46):
of both attitudes about human groups and attitudes about nonhuman groups.

(00:47:50):
And that these continue to be significant after controlling for various

(00:47:55):
sociodemographic factors that we know are kind of related to these kinds of

(00:47:59):
attitudes,

(00:47:59):
like being a man,

(00:48:00):
for example,

(00:48:01):
being more politically on the right,

(00:48:02):
etc.

(00:48:03):
And so they really I think it's the most robust evidence we have so far in our

(00:48:07):
field about this idea of a kind of generalized prejudice dimension.

(00:48:14):
Christoph,

(00:48:14):
one of the people that we founded this fair society with did a paper,

(00:48:18):
not in our journal,

(00:48:18):
but in a different journal several years ago with presenting what he called the SD

(00:48:23):
harm model,

(00:48:24):
the social dominance harm model.

(00:48:26):
Basically, this was the argument that like,

(00:48:29):
It's not the case that people are specifically anti-animal.

(00:48:32):
It's more that certain people just have a view that says,

(00:48:36):
I'm better than you or my group is better than your group.

(00:48:39):
And they tend to kind of rank different groups along these lines.

(00:48:42):
People tend to,

(00:48:43):
who are sort of more on the right wing,

(00:48:45):
for example,

(00:48:45):
are at the extreme of this where they think,

(00:48:47):
well,

(00:48:47):
anybody who's not from my group is somehow not good enough.

(00:48:50):
They should not be in my country.

(00:48:51):
They should not be marrying my children or whatever those kinds of attitudes are.

(00:48:54):
And there are some specific patterns,

(00:48:57):
like you could imagine a person who's a racist but not homophobic or a person who's

(00:49:01):
a sexist but not a speciesist or whatever.

(00:49:03):
But generally speaking,

(00:49:04):
people who have these kinds of attitudes about one group will tend to have

(00:49:08):
attitudes across the board about any sort of minoritized or underprivileged group.

(00:49:16):
Sire, I think I have a tabloid title for you.

(00:49:19):
If this ever,

(00:49:21):
the clickbait title,

(00:49:22):
if you ever decide to turn this into a tabloid podcast,

(00:49:24):
which is non-vegetarians are all racist.

(00:49:30):
You didn't hear it from me.

(00:49:33):
Well,

(00:49:35):
I don't know about that,

(00:49:36):
but in one of our very first episodes,

(00:49:39):
I think the very first episode,

(00:49:40):
actually,

(00:49:40):
Mark Wilson,

(00:49:41):
who is a political psychologist from Victoria University of Wellington,

(00:49:46):
Did say that he runs a survey across New Zealand every year,

(00:49:52):
every two years,

(00:49:54):
and gets hundreds of thousands of responses and sort of measures various different

(00:50:00):
behaviors to other behaviors.

(00:50:01):
And one association which he mentioned was that people with...

(00:50:09):
sort of more authoritarian personalities also tend to are less likely to be

(00:50:14):
vegetarian are less likely and though and therefore and also less likely to be on

(00:50:21):
sort of the left-wing side of the political spectrum

(00:50:24):
Again,

(00:50:24):
it depends per country because I feel like if you did something similar in India at

(00:50:30):
the current moment,

(00:50:31):
probably you would not get the same sort of alignment between left wing versus

(00:50:35):
right wing and vegetarian versus non-vegetarian.

(00:50:40):
Or I guess other countries as well.

(00:50:41):
So I think this has to be said that it's probably country and culture specific to some extent.

(00:50:47):
We actually just had a paper about this and I wish I remembered the result because

(00:50:50):
India was included in our study.

(00:50:52):
We did find a,

(00:50:53):
this is one of the most robust findings in this area that political orientation has

(00:50:57):
a strong relationship with how people think about nonhumans and other groups like

(00:51:01):
what we're talking about.

(00:51:04):
We did do a study testing whether that was moderated by culture.

(00:51:09):
I don't remember the specific result for India.

(00:51:14):
But yeah, there was some evidence of cultural variation, certainly, in this relationship.

(00:51:22):
Oh, that's really, really cool.

(00:51:24):
Yeah,

(00:51:24):
we will probably use a clickbait title at some point for something,

(00:51:28):
and then we can get a lot of hate from everyone.

(00:51:30):
You need a pog face to go along with it.

(00:51:34):
I mean,

(00:51:34):
what's interesting about this is that it's very difficult to admit that you're

(00:51:38):
racist,

(00:51:38):
even if you are.

(00:51:40):
Right.

(00:51:41):
So it's kind of hard to know if a person's racist because they're unlikely to tell.

(00:51:44):
You kind of have to observe their behavior carefully to see patterns of behavior

(00:51:48):
that suggest racism because they're unlikely.

(00:51:50):
And probably they wouldn't even tell themselves that they're racist necessarily.

(00:51:55):
Whereas it's pretty normative to be speciesist and people are pretty willing to

(00:52:00):
acknowledge being speciesist.

(00:52:01):
So there is this kind of disconnect.

(00:52:02):
So I do think the base rate of racism is much lower than the base rate of

(00:52:06):
speciesism,

(00:52:07):
particularly by self-report.

(00:52:10):
even though there is this kind of common underlying thread.

(00:52:12):
So I probably wouldn't be able to agree that all speciesists are racists.

(00:52:18):
It is very likely to me that anybody that would explicitly endorse being a racist

(00:52:23):
is likely to also be speciesist.

(00:52:27):
So that way is a more likely trend than this way.

(00:52:31):
Just because I don't know what the percent of racist would be.

(00:52:33):
It would depend a lot on how you operationalize racist,

(00:52:36):
but it's going to be lower than the base rate of speciesism.

(00:52:40):
Fair enough.

(00:52:41):
How do you think we'll treat aliens when they come over?

(00:52:46):
Who's to say they're not already here?

(00:52:49):
Yeah, I don't know.

(00:52:51):
This is a good question.

(00:52:52):
I mean, this speaks to this general idea, right?

(00:52:54):
Of like,

(00:52:55):
whether it's AI or non-humans or other groups,

(00:52:59):
humans for probably evolutionarily legitimate reasons tend to group people and to

(00:53:05):
arrange people according to things like threat,

(00:53:09):
opportunity,

(00:53:10):
utility,

(00:53:10):
et cetera.

(00:53:11):
Yeah.

(00:53:12):
And, you know, I would be worried in the current state of the world.

(00:53:15):
I'd be worried if aliens arrived here,

(00:53:17):
I would be worried about how we would treat them and then how the aliens would

(00:53:21):
respond.

(00:53:22):
Well, I feel the fact that they have the ability to come here means that we're at their mercy.

(00:53:29):
Otherwise, we would have gone there.

(00:53:30):
Seems like that to me too.

(00:53:33):
Seems likely.

(00:53:36):
We become the hunted.

(00:53:39):
We've been recording for about 55 minutes, so coming close to an hour.

(00:53:42):
Were there any sort of final things which you wanted to sort of say?

(00:53:45):
Anything which we didn't cover about the journal,

(00:53:50):
about your work or about...

(00:53:52):
I know you said you had a conference coming up as well before we started.

(00:53:58):
Yeah,

(00:53:58):
the difference between the conference and the journal is that the conference is an

(00:54:01):
explicitly advocacy-based conference.

(00:54:03):
So the idea of the journal is to publish scientific findings.

(00:54:06):
The idea of the conference is to combine scientists and advocates and get them in

(00:54:10):
the same place with the goal that the advocates can communicate to the scientists

(00:54:14):
what kind of work needs to be done to help them do their work.

(00:54:18):
And that the scientists can then in reverse communicate to the advocates like this

(00:54:21):
is the stuff that seems so things like,

(00:54:23):
you know,

(00:54:24):
the paper that I mentioned about what kind of appeals,

(00:54:26):
this would be the kind of thing that advocates should be interested in.

(00:54:28):
Right.

(00:54:29):
So that will be happening in Edinburgh in the first week of July,

(00:54:33):
July 2nd through the 6th,

(00:54:34):
I think,

(00:54:35):
something like that.

(00:54:36):
Um,

(00:54:37):
and so if you happen to be in Scotland around that time,

(00:54:40):
it would be great to see you there.

(00:54:42):
Um,

(00:54:43):
uh,

(00:54:44):
Peter Singer,

(00:54:44):
who's a fairly famous philosopher,

(00:54:46):
um,

(00:54:46):
in this area will be one of the keynote speakers and we're all looking forward to

(00:54:51):
seeing him and there's going to be a lot of other great talks.

(00:54:54):
Um, yeah, so I'm really excited about this.

(00:54:57):
This will be our third conference, uh, the second in-person conference.

(00:55:01):
And, you know, it's one of my favorite meetings to go to.

(00:55:06):
Oh, awesome.

(00:55:08):
Yeah, for non-researchers, conferences is how researchers get free travel to places.

(00:55:17):
Yeah, conferences are great for that.

(00:55:19):
I've never been to Edinburgh, and that's going to be one of the appeals for me.

(00:55:24):
Very pretty city.

(00:55:26):
Where was the last conference?

(00:55:29):
It was in Canterbury, University of Kent.

(00:55:33):
It's not a great place.

(00:55:35):
I enjoyed it.

(00:55:36):
I mean, you know, like pub culture is enough for me to want to come to the United Kingdom.

(00:55:43):
I mean,

(00:55:43):
you know,

(00:55:44):
the other thing besides going to a nice place is that,

(00:55:46):
you know,

(00:55:47):
it's this weird thing where there's many people interested in this topic,

(00:55:51):
but they're typically not all in the same place.

(00:55:54):
So the idea of,

(00:55:55):
you know,

(00:55:56):
300 people with this very kind of niche interest and shared kind of sensibility,

(00:56:03):
all being able to hang out and talk to each other,

(00:56:05):
it's really great.

(00:56:06):
Yeah.

(00:56:08):
No, awesome.

(00:56:11):
So hopefully I can attend the conference.

(00:56:15):
I am in the same country at the same time.

(00:56:17):
So hopefully.

(00:56:18):
That'd be super.

(00:56:20):
But thank you so much for coming on.

(00:56:24):
One question which we ask all our guests is if you had any piece of advice for our

(00:56:28):
listeners,

(00:56:29):
what would it be?

(00:56:32):
Never take advice.

(00:56:36):
Fair enough.

(00:56:38):
Don't take advice.

(00:56:39):
Here's our advice.

(00:56:39):
Don't take advice.

(00:56:40):
It's a paradox now.

(00:56:42):
So what did they do?

(00:56:43):
Yeah.

(00:56:44):
It's up to them.

(00:56:49):
Take it or leave it.

(00:56:51):
On that note, thank you very much, Chris, for coming on.

(00:56:56):
Thank you, Amr, for co-hosting again.

(00:56:59):
Thank you, everybody, for listening.

(00:57:00):
Do like, follow, subscribe.

(00:57:02):
Check out Chris's journal, Psychology of Human, Animal,

(00:57:09):
What's it?

(00:57:10):
Is it intergroup relations?

(00:57:12):
Intergroup relations.

(00:57:13):
Yeah.

(00:57:15):
Bring it back in one slow, sorry.

(00:57:18):
Say the name in one slow.

(00:57:19):
Okay.

(00:57:20):
Psychology of human-animal intergroup relations.

(00:57:23):
There we go.

(00:57:24):
There you go.

(00:57:24):
Got it.

(00:57:24):
All right.

(00:57:25):
All right, everybody.

(00:57:26):
Take care.

(00:57:27):
Until next time.

(00:57:28):
Goodbye.

(00:57:29):
See ya.

(00:57:33):
Cool.