An interview with Maxim Trenkenschuh and Prof Chris Hopwood about their new research, published in Anthrozoos, that explores how personality differences relate to people’s support for farmed animal welfare legislation, like Proposition 12 in the United States.
Maxim, could you briefly introduce yourself?
Hi, my name is Maxim Trenkenschuh and I’m currently a PhD student at the University of Zurich. I’m interested in human-animal intergroup relations and I specifically want to find out how individual differences in people’s motives and personality predicts how they treat non-humans (e.g., whether they eat animals or not). I study this topic with my PhD supervisor, Professor Chris Hopwood. I currently live in Bonn, Germany with my partner and our son and work remotely. I also enjoy making music, drawing and skating.
You recently investigated the role of personality in people’s support for animal welfare legislation. What inspired this research and what were some of the key findings?
We conducted this research together with Courtney Dillard from Mercy For Animals. We were interested in general attitudes of the US population towards specific arguments for and against California Proposition 12. In contrast to a lot of previous work on how personality relates to attitudes about animals, we assessed personality using a more fine-grained measure that captures both broad (“big five”) domains as well as narrower facets of those domains. We did this because domain effects can miss important nuance. For instance, the Openness domain has features related to curiosity and creativity and other features related to intelligence, and these facets might be related to attitudes about animals in different ways.
For those of us unfamiliar with Proposition 12, could you briefly explain what it is, and how it relates to this study?
Proposition 12, also called Farm Animal Confinement Initiative, was a ballot initiative in California, which aimed at improving animal agriculture conditions by requiring more space for egg-laying hens, breeding pigs, and veal calves. It prohibits the sale of meat and eggs from animals confined in a noncomplying manner, regardless of whether the animals were raised in California or elsewhere. Since it also pressures out-of-state animal agriculture to conform with the requirements, it is considered one of the most important pieces of legislation by animal welfare advocates. The proposition was approved by California voters in 2018 but challenged by the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation at the Supreme Court of the US. The Supreme Court upheld Proposition 12 in 2023. This means it is now much easier for a particular state like California to influence animal welfare regulations not only within their own market but also among their out-of-state ‘providers’.
We are used to thinking of personality having to do with stable, but fairly general traits, that are not always predictive of situationally-based behaviour. What made you think that personality would matter for specific animal-advocacy actions, like supporting Proposition 12?
We now know that personality is less stable than was once thought, and in fact changes are normative during the transition to adulthood, at a time when many people are forming political opinions. Also, whereas no psychological variable is very predictive of behaviour in individual situations, there is a large body of evidence showing that personality traits are robust predictors of broad patterns of behaviour involving health, environmental behaviour, attitudes about social justice and compassion for animals. For instance, a recent meta-analysis showed that Openness and Agreeableness were reliable predictors of vegetarian and vegan dietary identity. These traits are also associated with more liberal and progressive political attitudes, which suggests they might predict the kinds of people who would support Proposition 12.
Which personality aspects did you expect to relate to support for Proposition 12 and why? Were there any unexpected or surprising findings, given your predictions?
Openness to experience appears to be an important aspect of personality for a range of concerns connected to nature and animals (e.g., pro-environmental attitudes). While associations between Openness and animal welfare attitudes are already well established, we wanted to explore Openness in a more granulated way. We expected that one specific component of Openness – the part related to curiosity and creativity – would principally drive the association. Indeed, this was the case. By contrast, aspects of Openness related to intellect actually had a weak, negative association with support for Proposition 12. The personality trait Agreeableness was also consistently associated with support for Proposition 12 and support for keeping it. But surprisingly it was the politeness aspect of Agreeableness, more than the compassionate aspect, that was predictive. Finally, the withdrawal aspect of Neuroticism was related to greater support for Proposition 12. We did not predict this finding, but interpreted it as possibly related to vystopia, i.e., the distress many vegans and people who support animal rights feel about the plight of farmed animals.
You found no evidence that age, gender, region, or political orientation moderated any of the trait-attitude relationships in the study. Why might this be, and what does this imply about the role of personality in animal advocacy?
Moderation effects are uncommon in studies like these, so this was not particularly surprising. It is well-known that moderation effects, when present, tend to be very small and thus very large samples are needed to find them. Although we had 802 people in our sample, it is possible that an even larger sample would have detected very mild moderation effects. More likely to us is that personality traits predict attitudes about animals similarly across demographic groups.
Next steps: How might personality matter for other forms of animal advocacy, such as joining organizations, participating in protests, advocating for vegan diets, etc.? Do you have plans to look at such trait-behavior relations?
Our team recently published a meta-analysis showing that the personality traits Extraversion, Openness, and Agreeableness are related to different kinds of civic engagement, such as advocacy, donating to organizations, joining organizations etc. (Stalhmann et al., 2023). When you consider these results in combination with previous studies about the traits that predict veg*n diet, compassion for animals, and support for animal welfare legislation, it seems that people who are more open and agreeable are both more likely to have more sympathetic attitudes towards animals and also to act on those attitudes. We are unaware of studies about which traits predict the people who are likely to become animal advocates specifically. This would be a natural extension of this work. Our work is currently focused on how changes in personality traits and dietary motives are related to changes in meat consumption and attitudes about animals. As I mentioned above, we know that personality traits can change at both the population and individual levels, and we are curious about how these changes predict changing attitudes in ways that could be leveraged for effective advocacy.
Interview questions and blog by Jared Piazza
Cover photo by Bill Fairs
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