Raising Awareness for Animal Welfare: Comparing Animal Advocacy Advertisements

Animal welfare organizations use a wide variety of advertising campaigns to raise awareness about the treatment of animals and encourage more animal-friendly attitudes and behaviours. These campaigns can differ substantially in what they communicate and how they try to persuade their audience. For example, advertisements may focus on animal suffering, provide factual information about living conditions, evoke empathy or other emotions, emphasize similarities between humans and animals, highlight individual animals, or encourage people to change their consumption behaviour. However, we currently know relatively little about how these different approaches compare and which characteristics may contribute to their effectiveness.

In this project, you will identify and collect existing television commercials and other video advertisements aimed at raising awareness about the treatment and welfare of animals. You will develop a systematic overview of these advertisements and examine how they differ in their content and persuasive approach. Based on the advertisements identified, you will develop a coding framework to categorize the different strategies and characteristics they use.The next step will be to select a set of advertisements that systematically differ on relevant dimensions and pilot test them among participants. For example, the pilot study could examine whether the advertisements differ in the extent to which they evoke emotions, increase awareness of animal suffering, generate empathy or concern for animals, or motivate behavioural change.

The ultimate aim is to identify and characterize different approaches to animal welfare advertising and develop a well-tested set of stimuli that can be used in subsequent experimental research. This future research can then investigate which types of advertisements are most effective, for whom, and why, and connect their effects to psychological theories of persuasion, emotion, moral concern, and behaviour change.

The internship therefore combines stimulus collection, systematic content analysis, and pilot testing, and provides the groundwork for a larger experimental research programme on effective communication for animal welfare.

Animal welfare, animal advocacy, advertising, awareness campaigns, persuasive communication, behaviour change, content analysis, pilot testing

The section Psychology of Conflict, Risk and Safety at the University of Twente has a distinctive and unique profile in the areas of risk perception and risk communication, conflict and crisis management and the antecedents of risky, antisocial, and criminal behaviour. It currently includes 16 research staff members and 8 PhD students. We work from both a psychology and an engineering perspective and cooperate with other scientific disciplines, based on the “high tech, human touch” profile of the University of Twente.

Usually anytime. This internship is open to 2 students.

Please contact the PCRS internship coordinator Miriam Oostinga (m.s.d.oostinga@utwente.nl).  

• Mercy For Animals. (2016, October 13). What characteristics make videos most effective at inspiring individual dietary change? Mercy For Animals Research Blog. https://mercyforanimals.org/blog/making-effective-videos/ 
• Stel, M., Jaeger, B., & Sleegers, W. (forthcoming). Interventions to reduce animal product consumption: From evidence to enduring real-world impact. In M. Stel, J. Piazza, K. Dhont, & S. Loughnan (Eds.), Research handbook on the psychology of animal product consumption. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• The Vegan Society. (2019, September 3). Project update: A guide to effective animal campaigning. The Vegan Society. https://www.vegansociety.com/about-us/research/research-news/project-update-guide-effective-animal-campaigning