KICK THE HABIT: What vegan advocates can learn from the social spread of quitting smoking
While smoking and animal product consumption are not perfect analogies, the decreasing popularity of smoking may prove worthwhile for advocates to study as a template for animal product reduction. Indeed, smoking used to be widely popular, but smoking rates have fallen over the past century worldwide, partly due to a combination of changing smoking norms and rising evidence of its health and environmental consequences
ANDREA POLANCO: Anyone who has been vegan for a while has likely seen how their diet and lifestyle can influence or spread to those around them. Yet if each vegan was able to create two new vegans, we would have likely seen more significant shifts in the rates of veganism in recent decades. This illustrates the difficulties of understanding social contagion—the process of information (including attitudes or behaviors) spreading throughout a group—especially in relation to veganism. By understanding social contagion better, advocates can improve their diet change outreach, possibly by mastering the art of “vegan contagion.”
One way to understand social contagion is through a social network analysis where social interactions or relationships between individuals or groups of people (e.g., countries, political parties, sport teams, etc.) are mapped out and analysed. A full network, for example, is one that outlines all social ties within a particular context, such as all students within a university. But social networks have smaller networks within them of varying strengths too, such as a romantic couple within a friend group within an acquaintance group, overlapping within a classroom and the larger university group (see figure below).
Spreading veganism or vegetarianism (combined, veg*nism)—with the long-lasting behavioral changes and beliefs it entails—requires complex contagion, which is repeated exposures by strong ties (e.g., friends and family), not just the simple spread of information. SOURCE…
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