Cognitive biases and animal welfare (with Leah Edgerton)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with Leah Edgerton, former Executive Director of Animal Charity Evaluators, about using evidence to help animals, cognitive biases in animal welfare, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in animal rights advocacy. They also discuss managing chronic pain.
Deep Dive Analysis
19 Topic Outline
Using Reason and Evidence in Animal Advocacy
Tension Between Short-Term and Long-Term Animal Advocacy
Addressing Criticisms: Animal vs. Human Suffering
Addressing Criticisms: Negative Perception of Animal Activism
Effective Altruism vs. Emotional Lens in Animal Advocacy
Trauma and Frustration in Animal Advocacy Work
Reality of Typical Factory Farm Conditions
Human Cognitive Dissonance Regarding Animal Products
Nuance in Animal Farming and Optimal Human-Animal Relationships
Strategies for Reducing Animal Suffering Without Full Veganism
Challenges in Empathizing with Fish Welfare
Cognitive Biases Affecting Views on Animal Suffering
The Future of Animal-Free Food Products
Navigating Tensions Between Effective Altruism and Social Justice
Impact of DEI Issues on Organizational Effectiveness
Moral Consistency and Human Psychology
Leah's Personal Journey with Chronic Pain
Managing Chronic Pain Through Mindfulness and Mindset
The Nature of Pain and its Perception
4 Key Concepts
Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights
Animal welfare focuses on reducing harm and improving conditions for animals, accepting human involvement in their treatment. Animal rights, conversely, aims to grant animals freedoms and autonomy, questioning human dominion over them.
Scope Insensitivity
Humans struggle to emotionally differentiate between the suffering of a small number of individuals versus a massive number. This cognitive bias makes it hard to grasp the scale of suffering, such as that of hundreds versus billions of animals.
Cognitive Dissonance (Animal Products)
This refers to the mental discomfort experienced when holding conflicting beliefs, such as caring about animal suffering while consuming animal products. People often resolve this by believing the animal products they purchase come from well-treated animals, despite evidence to the contrary.
The Second Arrow (Buddhist Concept)
This concept distinguishes between the initial pain or suffering (the first arrow) and the subsequent emotional reaction, resistance, or upset to that suffering (the second arrow). By minimizing the 'second arrow,' one can reduce their subjective experience of suffering, even if the initial pain remains.
10 Questions Answered
There is scientific consensus that animals are conscious and can suffer, and the scale of animal suffering is immense. Furthermore, animal suffering, particularly in factory farming, is often linked to human issues like climate change, environmental pollution, poor labor conditions, and social problems.
Traditional animal rights activism, often perceived as highly emotional or confrontational, can be a turn-off for many. However, an effective altruism approach offers a different, evidence-based framework for addressing animal suffering that may appeal to a broader audience.
Animals are often subjected to forced breeding and insemination, extreme confinement (e.g., gestation crates for pigs), immediate separation of mothers and babies (e.g., dairy cows), crowded and unsanitary environments, and are given antibiotics to prevent disease. They are typically bred for rapid growth and slaughtered while still young.
Many people resolve this cognitive dissonance by believing that the animal products they purchase come from animals that were well-treated, even if they acknowledge that farmed animals generally suffer. This allows them to maintain their moral belief without changing their behavior.
Farmed fish are generally considered to have the lowest welfare, while cows raised for meat tend to have the highest welfare, often spending much of their lives grazing outdoors before being moved to feedlots. Egg-laying hens and chickens raised for meat also experience very low welfare.
One approach is to reduce consumption of smaller animals like chickens and fish, as they represent a higher number of individual lives per calorie. Trying plant-based alternatives, which are becoming more affordable and tastier, is also recommended as a way to gradually reduce animal product consumption.
Humans tend to empathize less with beings that look very different from themselves, and fish are often perceived as alien water animals. Additionally, the immense diversity of fish species is often overlooked, leading to a generalized lack of connection.
Key biases include reduced empathy for beings that look less like humans, and the tendency to assign lower moral status or capacity for suffering to animals deemed edible. Humans also rationalize their behavior to avoid believing they are constantly engaging in immoral actions.
Managing chronic pain often involves learning not to react to it, adopting a mindset that avoids victimhood, and focusing on what one can control. Techniques like mindfulness meditation can help increase awareness of pain triggers and develop a separation between the physical sensation and the mental suffering.
While advocating for rights and accessibility for marginalized groups is crucial, personally identifying too strongly with an identity that has caused harm or marginalization can paradoxically increase one's own suffering. It can be more personally helpful to focus on pursuing interests and managing challenges concretely, rather than dwelling on the unfairness.
30 Actionable Insights
1. Balance Emotion with Reason
Use evidence-based frameworks to address emotionally charged problems like animal suffering, preventing emotional overwhelm from debilitating effective action and enabling a clearer approach to problem-solving.
2. Minimize Reaction to Pain
When experiencing pain, focus on minimizing emotional resistance, upset, or negative reactions (the ‘second arrow’) to prevent exacerbating the subjective experience of suffering.
3. Cultivate Reactive Control to Pain
Develop the ability to separate the physical sensation of pain from the emotional reaction to it, allowing for a conscious choice in how to respond rather than an automatic, suffering-inducing reaction.
4. Avoid Victim Identity
While acknowledging challenges, avoid adopting a ‘victim mentality’ or over-identifying with identities that cause harm or marginalization, as this can psychologically impair one’s ability to make the best of a situation and pursue personal interests.
5. Use Evidence for Advocacy
When trying to help animals, apply evidence and reason to identify the most effective interventions, considering a broad range of philosophical views (animal rights vs. welfare).
6. Prioritize Impact in Advocacy
Focus efforts on helping animals that can be assisted most effectively with available time and money, such as farmed animals due to their high numbers and known effective interventions.
7. Consider Long-Term Impact
When evaluating interventions, look beyond short-term gains (e.g., small welfare improvements) and consider potential negative long-term returns, favoring transformational approaches (e.g., legal personhood, anti-speciesism advocacy) for greater societal change.
8. Build Sustainable Movements
Invest in developing strong organizational culture, reducing turnover, and instilling good norms (e.g., open science, impact assessment, DEI) to ensure the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of advocacy movements.
9. DEI for Effectiveness
Recognize that issues like sexual harassment or discrimination significantly impair organizational effectiveness, cause high turnover, and lead to advocates leaving the movement; therefore, implement DEI standards to maintain a healthy and effective movement.
10. Ensure Fair Hiring
To maximize effectiveness, ensure organizations can hire and retain the best talent by actively combating discrimination within the movement that might exclude valuable individuals from the talent pool.
11. Promote Inclusive Advocacy
Avoid creating an exclusive animal advocacy movement where only vegans are accepted or valued, encouraging diverse levels of participation and effort towards reducing animal suffering.
12. Integrate Plant-Based Alternatives
Actively try and incorporate affordable, tasty plant-based alternatives into your diet, experimenting with recipes to find suitable options and gradually reduce animal product consumption.
13. Reduce Fish Consumption
Minimize or eliminate fish consumption, especially farmed carnivorous fish, as their production involves the suffering and death of many smaller feeder fish, leading to a higher overall animal impact.
14. Avoid Fish & Chicken
Prioritize avoiding farmed fish and chicken products (including egg-laying hens) due to their generally lower welfare conditions and higher individual animal impact per calorie.
15. Prioritize Larger Animals
If unable to go fully vegan, consider consuming products from larger animals (e.g., cows) over smaller ones (e.g., chickens, fish) to reduce the number of individual animal lives impacted per calorie.
16. Consider Less Common Animals
If consuming animal products, opt for less commonly consumed animals (e.g., bison, water buffalo, ducks) as they are less likely to be factory-farmed and may experience better welfare conditions.
17. Optimize Pain Environment
Adapt your living and working environment (e.g., ergonomic furniture) to reduce daily reminders and physical triggers of chronic pain, helping to minimize its presence in daily awareness.
18. Engage in Flow States
Utilize activities that induce a ‘flow state’ (e.g., music practice, meditation) to become deeply engaged and temporarily unaware of chronic pain, providing mental relief.
19. Use Mindfulness for Pain
Practice meditation or mindfulness to increase bodily awareness, which can help identify specific triggers or activities that worsen or improve chronic pain, leading to better management strategies.
20. Flexible Pain Mindset
Understand that even without a definitive diagnosis or cure, the brain can adapt to live a worthwhile life with chronic pain, and improving one’s relationship with the pain can surprisingly lead to a better subjective experience.
21. Connect Animal & Human Suffering
When advocating for animal welfare, highlight the interconnectedness with human suffering, climate change, environmental pollution, and social problems (e.g., poor worker conditions, environmental racism) to broaden appeal and understanding.
22. Broaden Advocacy Engagement
Recognize that involvement in animal advocacy doesn’t require specific personality types or participation in traditional protests; it’s a moral and philosophical question open to diverse approaches.
23. Educate on Farm Practices
Inform people that animal suffering in factory farms is not due to isolated abuse but is inherent to standard, institutionalized practices in breeding, living conditions, and slaughter, challenging the belief that their purchased products are from ‘better’ farms.
24. Reduce Factory Farm Consumption
Encourage reducing or eliminating consumption of factory-farmed animal products to remove the need for self-justification and open the door for more nuanced societal conversations about human-animal relationships.
25. Address Cognitive Dissonance
Understand that people rationalize behaviors that conflict with their moral values; effective advocacy should aim to reduce the need for such rationalizations by offering viable, ethical alternatives.
26. Recognize Similarity Bias
Be aware of the human bias to treat beings more fairly the more similar they look to us, and consciously challenge this tendency to extend moral consideration more broadly.
27. Challenge Edibility Bias
Be aware that perceiving an animal as edible can subconsciously lower its moral status and perceived capacity for suffering, and actively challenge this bias when considering animal welfare.
28. Avoid Moral Halo Effect
Do not assume that strong moral engagement in one area (e.g., animal welfare) automatically translates to ethical behavior or values in other areas (e.g., treatment of employees); maintain vigilance across all ethical domains.
29. Pursue Interests Despite Challenges
Acknowledge and address specific challenges related to chronic pain or disability at a concrete level, but continue to pursue personal interests and goals regardless of these difficulties.
30. Balance Discourse & Inclusion
In truth-seeking and advocacy, foster open discourse to explore ideas and question the status quo, while also actively ensuring that all relevant stakeholders and diverse perspectives are included at the table.
5 Key Quotes
I think humans are relatively insensitive to the scope of suffering. It's just hard for us to emotionally relate differently to the suffering of say, you know, a hundred animals or a hundred billion animals. Our brains aren't really built to handle those numbers and to be able to treat each one of those individuals as mattering as much as another one.
Leah Edgerton
I think it's important to understand that, you know, you don't have to be best friends with everyone, you know, out doing street campaigns. It's a moral question. It's a philosophical question.
Leah Edgerton
The hardest part is not necessarily the animal suffering itself, but the fact that they come out and, and nobody understands what they've seen or takes it seriously.
Leah Edgerton
The more different from us something looks, the less likely we are to treat it fairly, or be able to kind of view it as a moral agent.
Spencer Greenberg
Being really morally engaged in, in one area doesn't necessarily carry over to values to another area.
Leah Edgerton
1 Protocols
Managing Chronic Pain
Leah Edgerton- Avoid thinking about the pain or reacting to it emotionally, applying the 'second arrow' concept.
- Recognize that identifying with a 'disabled' identity can be personally harmful, despite being grateful for disability rights.
- Set realistic expectations for oneself on bad pain days, acknowledging that negative thoughts may arise and choosing to ignore them.
- Utilize flow states, such as through music practice or engaging activities, to divert attention from pain.
- Practice body scan meditations, starting from non-painful areas (e.g., feet) to gradually build mindfulness without immediate focus on discomfort.
- Observe and identify specific ergonomic or stressful situations that exacerbate pain to gain better control over its triggers.
- Maintain a high threshold for not engaging with or resisting physical pain, making a conscious choice in how to react to sensations.