Finding our people in animal advocacy

In this post, I hypothesize about what kind of people would be the most enthusiastic supporters of EA-aligned approaches to animal advocacy. Identifying their characteristics helps with designing more effective communication strategies. I argue that low need for cognitive closure and low disgust sensitivity might predict strong alignment with EA-aligned approaches to animal advocacy.

Disclaimer: I’m not a scientist. I’m drafting these hypotheses so that some professional researcher might pick them up and rigorously test them. I don’t have data for either of these hypotheses.

One of the main divisions in animal advocacy is between incrementalists and absolutists. Adoption of either approach seems to correspond to two psychological traits: need for cognitive closure and disgust sensitivity.

Need for cognitive closure

Need for cognitive closure refers to an individual's desire for a clear, firm answer or peaceful resolution to a question or problem to avert ambiguity. (Kruglanski, A. W.; Webster, D. M. (April 1996). "Motivated closing of the mind: 'Seizing' and 'freezing'". Psychological Review. 103 (2): 263–83.)

It should be clear how absolutist positions satisfy the need for cognitive closure. According to these positions, there is only one right thing to do. It's the right thing to do in all contexts. Correct activism is doing the right thing and asking other people to do the same.

Not having an obvious answer in certain contexts causes anxiety for people with high need for cognitive closure. Absolutist theories relieve this anxiety.

If this is the case, we should focus on people with lower need for cognitive closure. We can identify them by the following signs:

• Willingness to appreciate outgroups when they do something right
• Epistemic humility, using hedging words when explaining themselves
• Admitting the possibility of multiple hypotheses
• Positive appreciation when someone changes their mind on issues
• Willingness to change beliefs

Disgust sensitivity

Disgust sensitivity refers to a person's tendency to feel disgust.

Absolutist strategies generally focus on disgust-maximizing. According to this strategy, to eliminate animal product consumption, the correct approach is to maximize society's disgust toward animal products and create a taboo as strong as the taboo around pedophilia. To reach that point, animal product consumption is condemned in the strongest terms. Being contaminated by animal products is to be avoided at all costs. Disgust also has a black-and-white nature: a very small amount of disgusting contaminant can make a whole pool of water disgusting. For that reason, this strategy is also quite binary.

Following absolutist strategy aligns better with your needs if you have higher disgust sensitivity. Such individuals feel better about punishing wrongdoers in general. They also have stronger disgust emotions against wrongdoing, so they feel more comfortable condemning it with the strongest words in every form. The binary nature of disgust also aligns well with absolutist ethics.

This is anecdotal, but my observation is that absolutist activists tend to demonstrate higher disgust sensitivity in both moral and daily contexts. They are more likely to be disgusted by people around them eating meat or feel disgust when they feed animal products to their companion animals. They are also more likely to use judgmental emojis like clown or vomit emojis. More speculatively, my observation is that they are also more repulsed by hygiene-related triggers like handshakes.

On the other hand, incrementalists are less likely to feel viscerally disgusted by moral norm violations. They are also more open to trying things that the average person might find disgusting.

If this hypothesis is correct, we can find our people by noticing the following behaviors:

• Lower tendency to use judgmental words and emojis
• Lower tendency to feel disgust
• Comfort with sharing food on their plate with others
• Ease with discussing disgusting topics
• More nuanced attitudes toward stigmatized outgroups (though who is an "outgroup" depends on the person)
• More complex attitudes toward criminals
• Support for more lenient punishment
• More positive attitudes to organ donation

Many movement leaders in EA-aligned advocacy report being unkempt in their youth and dressing more conventionally later in life to become more effective. Quoting Bruce Friedrich: "For years in the early '90s, I had a full beard and shoulder length hair, wore only clothes that I figured no one else would want, and refused to bathe more than once per week."

I think Vitalik is another example of someone with low need for cognitive closure and low disgust sensitivity. He also donated $500k to the EA Animal Welfare Fund last year.

Photo: Doc. TechCrunch

Considerations to the contrary

a. Scoring high on both of these traits normally correlates with right-wing political views. Absolutist animal advocates tend to be politically left-wing. This is some evidence against my theory. However, my observation is that absolutist advocates still tend to be more authoritarian than the average leftist.

b. Pure, simple utilitarianism also caters well to people with a high need for cognitive closure. Pure utilitarians are also enthusiastic supporters of EA-aligned approaches.

c. Having a high concentration of low disgust sensitivity people could render the movement too weird for mainstream audiences.

d. I'm concerned that people who score low in need for cognitive closure and disgust sensitivity might have weaker pro-animal attitudes in general. In the surveys I conducted among our supporters, higher pragmatism and open-mindedness were negatively correlated with pro-animal diets and pro-animal responses in meat attachment and speciesism scales. I'm not sure why this occurs—perhaps these people are less affected by social desirability bias and less afraid to give "uglier" answers to questions. But I observed this relationship across two different surveys.

e. Violation of the natural order is a big motivator for supporters of welfare campaigns. Many are mobilized by fear of and anger against an artificial state of affairs. I’m not sure how much we can attract low disgust sensitivity people while trying to attract people with a strong preference for the natural.