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Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies



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A Roadmap for Collaboration between Animal Rights Advocates and Psychological Scientists

From Jared Piazza, The Society for the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations PHAIR
October 2023

Best practice would be for animal rights advocates and psychological scientists to fully consider these kinds of issues ahead of time and come to a transparent agreement about how they would be handled during their collaboration. Our idea was to generate a document that could guide people at the outset of this kind of work.

Read the entire report here: A Roadmap for Collaboration between Animal Rights Advocates and Psychological Scientists

 


Photo credit: "Friends' footsteps" - Linda Robert, Unsplash.com

What is the brief history of this document? What motivated its production, how did it come together, and who has been involved?

A few years ago, I started consulting on a project with Courtney Dillard and Andie Thompkins from Mercy For Animals (MFA) to conduct survey data on attitudes about farmed animals and plant-based foods across 23 countries. During our work together, it became clear to me that there are important differences in the way academics like me and advocates like Courtney and Andie approach our work. This collaboration has been wonderful for me so far, and hopefully MFA has also seen it as a success. However, there were some differences in perspective along the way that I wished I had considered ahead of time.

For instance, my practice is to always post all my materials, data, and script for other researchers to access, use, and check my work, but there are obvious reasons why this is not advisable in an advocacy context. Another example is that the outlets that are most impactful for scientists (peer-reviewed journals like PHAIR) are not the same as the outlets that are most impactful for advocates (more publicly visible blogs, social media, and targeted communications to members), and this can affect the way studies are conducted and how the results are written up. These are not things I really thought fully about before beginning this project with MFA, but I spent a lot of time thinking about them during our work together.

Courtney, Andie, and I agreed that it might be helpful to the field for us to try to parse these kinds of issues and to encourage productive advocacy-science collaboration more generally. We enlisted two colleagues who we knew would have significant experience and good ideas about this – Andrea Polanco from Faunalytics and Chris Bryant from Bryant Research.

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.

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