Saulius recently published an excellent post about the results of certain opinion surveys relevant to animal advocates.
He suggested that to internalize the results you could guess the result of a question before reading what it was. I thought that we could do this one better by turning it into a quiz!
Click here for a fourteen-question quiz! When you’re done, you can compare how well you did to everyone else who took the quiz.
Thing of Things 
I did poorly on this one, and I still find some of the answers surprising and confusing. I would not have expected a significant proportion of omnivores to say that animals have exactly the same rights as humans.
Even more confusing to me is the result that only 20% of people think that animals definitely shouldn’t have access to legal representation “the same way that humans do”. I suppose the context given in the original question makes the answer a little more understandable, but I still think a substantial proportion of people are taking more radical stances than they really intend in their answers to these questions.
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A lot of people seem to answer surveys not primarily based on their actual beliefs, but more as signaling exercises, where they select the answer that makes it clear to what group they want to belong.
This is also how (semi-)’normal’ people seem to behave in real life, where they don’t primarily act in a principled way, but first and foremost seek acceptance and membership of the group they want to belong to, even though a lot of people are in denial about this.
This makes a lot of sense from a evolutionary point of view. Human survivability is typically increased by cooperative behavior. A bit of risk-taking stubbornness is good for innovation, but not too much. This is why puberty exist and why the disposable sex whose existence is less important for reproduction, tends to be less cooperative and more stubborn (hence way more male inventors and way more male criminals), although they still engage in plenty of acceptance-seeking behavior.
Anyway, this is probably also why it is fairly easy to get people to change their answers (or real life behavior) by changing the packaging. For example, by phrasing survey questions with rhetoric that identifies the question as being asked by someone with a certain ideology or other group identity. Or by phrasing the question in a leading way, where it is made clear what answer is the desired one.
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> 32% of Americans think that animals have the same rights as humans to be free of harm and exploitation.
> 7% of Americans identify as vegetarian or vegan.
i don’t see how you can square this unless 25% of people are suffering massive cognitive dissonance.
other explanations:
* “killed so we can eat it” is not “harm or exploitation” (seems unlikely to account for 25% of population, but probably some fall here)
* humans do not have the right to be free of “killed so we can eat it”-level harm and exploitation (i assume this is a massively fringe position)
am i missing something? are people acting massively against their own values, or misrepresenting their values on this poll?
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Yes, and the number of people believing animals should have legal representation seems similarly large.
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I think that most respondents spent just ~5 seconds on the question and didn’t stop to imagine how different the world would look like if animals had the same rights, and that this would come at the expense of a lot of luxuries for humans. If you would ask them more questions about this in person, they would change their position, or maybe say that only pets or something deserve the same rights. That is how I see it, but I’m not sure.
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This is the main reason I did so poorly. I correctly chose what percentage of Americans were Vegetarian or Vegan, and assumed the other answers would follow logically from that low number. In retrospect, I should have realized that the average American doesn’t obsessively make sure their actions and beliefs logically follow each other.
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Note that the actual percentage of people who are strict dietary vegans or vegetarians is lower. Previous surveys suggests that most of the people who claim to be vegetarians or vegans in such surveys ate meat at some point in the last 2 days (see https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/is-the-percentage-of-vegetarians-and-vegans-in-the-u-s-increasing/ )
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@foxlisk
Doesn’t this merely reflect your biases and/or views?
Imagine that a survey would have these findings:
– 80% of Americans think that people should not be exploited by employers
– 7% of Americans identify as anti-capitalists
I would expect that this would be considered incongruous by someone who considers capitalism to be inherently exploitative, but not by someone who distinguishes between exploitative forms of capitalism and more benevolent forms of capitalism.
Note that using someone for your ends is often not considered exploitative when it sufficiently benefits the other. For example, lots of capitalists think that a ‘fair’ wage is sufficient to balance the scales, even if people are passively or actively coerced into accepting a job, while they consider it is exploitation if people are coerced to do that same work without compensation.
Perhaps many people who answer the survey don’t consider it to be net exploitation or net harm when animals are treated fairly well, even if they end up as food. After all, if you define it as exploitation when people bring a being into the world with a nigh-guarantee that this being will experience some suffering and where they personally benefit from this, then aren’t all parents exploiters of their children?
Many survey question are rather ludicrous if you get down to it. For example, we clearly don’t actually recognize a human right to be free of harm and exploitation. All but a tiny minority of hardcore libertarians, consider it justifiable to exploit people with talent, good health and such, to benefit those without those things. In fact, the expectation is that we all spend most of our lives doing jobs that benefit others, although we have a capitalist system to compensate people for it.
So if animals are to be just as free of harm and exploitation as humans, aren’t they treated just as fairly if we ‘pay’ them with shelter, food and such, but we in turn expect them to use their talent to help humans. Of course, their talent happens to be their meat, skin, etc, but on the other hand, many animals get to spend their lives in leisure, while humans get forced to study to prepare them to work, then get to spend their good years spending most of the day doing work, until late in their lives when their bodies and mind start deteriorating and they get pensions (if they are fortunate).
Of course, the entire ‘same rights as humans’ is totally absurd, because animals neither want or can use the same rights as humans. Imagine giving a cat a printing press so it can exercise the right to free speech… Similarly, human rights tend to be linked to human obligations, but animals cannot take on human obligations.
So isn’t anyone who answers the survey accepting inane questions and just taking a stab at answering it in a way that cannot but be similarly inane.
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My results: here
Got 6/14 and in spite of getting <50% I am satisfied with the knowledge I apparently have on this topic. Biggest mistake in my opinion is underestimating number of animals harmed considered equal to one human; my estimate was 10 when the actual amount was 10000. I also bungled the factors considered most/least important for animal welfare, placing comfortable bedding as most important when it was least. I was overly cynical on the perceived value of superficial feel-good aid and didn't consider that the superficiality was obvious to the average poll-taker. I was also overwhelmed by the number of different options for those two questions and did not give them due consideration. For most of the remaining questions I thought the answer I gave was close to the correct one.
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The link is not right. Let’s try again: my results here.
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Haha, thanks for this, I will include the link to this poll in my post. I myself scored 9/14 despite looking at those results a lot when writing the post. Although all the wrong answers were close.
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I made a Bayesian version of the quiz using Louis Faucon’s Bayes-Up.
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