The knowledge gap about factory farming is very, very real. But simply telling people about how big the problem is won’t move them to act. Seeing the problem shrunk down to feel more solvable (like in a local campaign). If we can’t, it’s probably best to skip the statistics entirely and simply get people to care about a specific animal. You are probably familiar with the phrase ‘one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.’ It’s true. We are more likely to feel empathy for a single individual than for a group, including a group of animals.
BJORN: The recently released Project Phoenix report, written in collaboration with Laila Kassam and Natalie Braine, is based on a survey of 2,000 people in the UK to better understand their views on factory farming. What we found was pretty optimistic! Two-thirds of Brits say that factory farming is wrong or raises moral concerns, 54% want it ended or phased out (not just regulated), and a slim majority (51%) think we should all be eating a lot less meat… We asked everyone what percentage of animals in the UK they thought were factory-farmed. 96% of respondents either underestimated the number or had no idea…
My first thought when I saw this massive knowledge chasm was the most obvious: correct it. Just tell people how bad it really is, and we’re halfway to solving the problem! It’s an instinctive and natural reaction that I had — but it’s also dead wrong. In 1992 researchers ran what would become an infamous study in donor psychology. People read a story about migratory birds drowning in uncovered oil ponds and were asked how much they’d pay to prevent it. Simple enough. The catch was that different people saw different numbers of affected birds — 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000. It made almost no difference in how the three groups chose to donate: $80, $78, and $88, respectively.
It’s been replicated many times since, swapping in different victims — refugees, farmed animals — creating a clear pattern: as the scale of a problem increases, our concern for it barely budges. We are all scope-insensitive… There’s a reason our brains work this way. If we took the grief we feel for one suffering person and multiplied it by a million, our minds short-circuit — drowning in despair, fear, and helplessness. Instead, we undergo psychic numbing, an empathetic defense mechanism, which makes it harder for us to understand and act on big issues, like genocide, climate change, and of course, factory farming.
Factory farming is really, really, really bad, and really, really, really big: it affects billions of land animals every year and trillions when we count aquatic animals too. I often see animal advocates posting these factory farming statistics, hoping it’ll shock people into taking action. I get the instinct. But “billions of chickens are suffering right now” plopped onto an Instagram carousel, with no story attached, may actually do the opposite… Humans are weird sometimes. We respond more positively when we can solve a greater chunk of a problem, regardless of the raw number of individuals we’ve managed to help…
If you tell people they can save 200 animals — a rounding error in the grand scheme of the world’s farming systems — they’ll just shrug. But if they can save 200 out of 250 animals, they’ll be more likely to jump into action. Here’s what it can look like in practical terms: some stats about local factory farms — “there are four factory farms in our district, so let’s unite to convert them,” feels a hell of a lot more doable than “there are 80 billion chickens suffering in the world, so eat some cauliflower hot wings.” It’s also one reason why I suspect the Ridglan farm rescue succeeded — because so few animals were involved, people felt they had a real chance of making a change for them and were thus more motivated to take action. We have a psychological predisposition for picking low-hanging fruit, so let’s use that to our advantage…
The knowledge gap about factory farming is very, very real. But simply telling people about how big the problem is won’t move them to act. As tempting as it is to shout big, scary statistics into the void, we need to be smarter than that… seeing the problem shrunk down to feel more solvable (like in a local campaign). If we can’t…, it’s probably best to skip the statistics entirely and simply get people to care about a specific animal. You are probably familiar with the phrase “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” It’s true. We are more likely to feel empathy for a single individual than for a group, including a group of animals. SOURCE
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