Animal Advocates Don’t Have To Debunk Every Lie
Misinformation is everywhere.
Humans need meat to survive. Zoos protect endangered species. Exotic animals make perfectly good companions. Animal farming is necessary. Captivity is educational. There is always another claim to correct, another myth to dismantle and another comment section full of people confidently repeating something that is simply not true. The instinct of animal advocates is usually obvious: correct them. Show them the evidence. Explain why they are wrong. Provide the source. Debunk the myth. But what if that is not always the most effective strategy?
Research published in Scientific Reports suggests there may be another approach. Rather than trying to convince someone that a particular belief is false, advocates may sometimes achieve just as much by directing their attention towards another belief that leads them towards a different conclusion. The researchers call this bypassing. And it could have some interesting implications for animal advocacy.
People Do Not Like Being Corrected
Debunking misinformation works.
That is important to establish from the beginning. The researchers are not arguing that facts are useless or that misinformation should simply be ignored. The problem is that correcting people has limitations. People generally get upset being told they are wrong. Corrections can sometimes increase people’s memory of the misinformation being corrected. Some beliefs, particularly those connected with conspiracy theories, can also be extremely difficult to disprove because they have been constructed in ways that make them resistant to contradictory evidence. Anyone who has spent enough time arguing on social media will probably recognise the problem.
You provide evidence.
They reject the source.
You provide another source.
They move onto another claim.
You answer that claim.
Suddenly you are 14 replies deep into an argument with somebody who was never seriously considering changing their mind in the first place. So researchers Christopher Calabrese and Dolores Albarracín asked a different question. What if you simply went around the misinformation?
What Is Bypassing?
The idea comes from understanding how beliefs influence attitudes.
Our attitudes towards something are rarely determined by one fact stored neatly inside our heads. They can instead be connected to numerous different beliefs, and we are not thinking about all of those beliefs simultaneously.
What happens when one particular belief becomes more prominent can therefore influence how we feel about the wider issue. Imagine somebody encounters misinformation claiming that genetically modified crops cause cancer. The traditional response is straightforward: challenge the cancer claim. Show that the evidence does not support it. Explain why the research being cited is unreliable. Correct the misinformation directly.
Bypassing takes a different route.
Instead of talking about cancer at all, you might draw attention towards potential benefits of genetically modified crops. You are not necessarily changing the original belief. You are changing which belief is occupying the person’s attention when they form their attitude. The researchers tested whether this could work across three experiments involving a total of 1,435 participants. The answer was remarkably consistent. It did.
Going Around The Lie Worked
In the first experiment, 360 participants read misinformation claiming that genetically modified corn products caused severe allergic reactions.
They were then divided into three groups. One received no further information. Another received a direct correction explaining why the claim was false. The third received information about the potential for genetically modified crops to alleviate global hunger and malnutrition. That third message did not correct the allergy misinformation.
It bypassed it. Both approaches produced similar results.
Participants who received either the correction or the bypassing message showed weaker intentions to support restrictions on genetically modified foods and less positive attitudes towards those restrictions than participants who received the misinformation alone. Correcting the falsehood worked. But so did talking about something else.
The researchers then repeated the experiment with 303 participants.
This time, the bypassing message introduced the idea that genetically modified crops could potentially benefit bee populations. Again, both correction and bypassing reduced support for restrictions compared with the misinformation control. The researchers had now demonstrated something particularly interesting. The bypassing message did not even need to remind people of something they already believed. It could introduce a new belief that pointed towards a different conclusion.
Then They Tested It Again
The third experiment was larger and preregistered, involving 772 participants in a sample designed to broadly approximate the US population.
This time, participants encountered misinformation based on a retracted study linking genetically modified corn with accelerated tumour growth in rodents. Crucially, the researchers also introduced a genuine control group who never encountered the misinformation. This allowed them to test whether the misinformation itself had actually changed people’s attitudes. It had.
Exposure increased support for restricting genetically modified foods. But once again, both direct correction and bypassing reversed the effect. Participants who received the correction and participants who received information about genetically modified crops potentially helping bee populations showed lower support for restrictions than those who received misinformation alone. More importantly, their attitudes were statistically indistinguishable from people who had never encountered the misinformation.
In other words, both strategies effectively neutralised its influence.
But they did so in very different ways.
You Do Not Always Have To Change The False Belief
Direct correction reduced people’s belief in the misinformation. Tell somebody convincingly that a claim is false and they may stop believing it.
Bypassing did something different.
It strengthened belief in another piece of information that pointed towards the opposite conclusion. The original false belief did not necessarily disappear. Its influence simply became less important.
That is perhaps the most fascinating finding in the research.
Advocates often behave as though persuasion requires systematically removing every incorrect belief somebody holds. Maybe it does not.
Sometimes another belief can simply become more important.
The first experiment demonstrated that this can involve reminding somebody of something they already believe. The researchers found that the idea that genetically modified foods could contribute towards feeding the global population appeared to be widely held regardless of which group participants were in. The bypassing message did not necessarily create the belief. It brought it to the front of their minds. That alone was enough to influence attitudes.
What This Means For Animal Advocates
The implications for animal advocacy are obvious. We operate in an environment saturated with misinformation, tradition, assumptions and beliefs people may have repeated for decades. Our response cannot always be an endless game of misinformation whack-a-mole.
Someone makes a false claim.
We correct it.
They make another.
We correct that.
They make another.
Meanwhile, the conversation remains completely centred around the framing chosen by the person defending animal exploitation. Bypassing offers another possibility. Instead of allowing misinformation to determine the subject of every conversation, advocates can introduce compelling evidence that points towards the conclusion we actually want people considering.
Issues including consuming animals, using animals for entertainment and keeping exotic animals as companions as areas where this approach could potentially be useful. Imagine someone has constructed an entire worldview around defending the use of animals in entertainment. There may be value in correcting individual false claims. But there may also be value in asking an entirely different question. Why should another sentient individual exist for our entertainment in the first place? That does not require us to accept misinformation. It means refusing to let misinformation dictate every battlefield on which we fight.
Facts Still Matter
There are important limitations.
These experiments measured short-term attitudes and intentions in controlled online environments. They did not demonstrate that bypassing produces lasting changes in behaviour.
The researchers also caution that bypassing may be less effective when misinformation is extremely accessible. If a false belief is dominating somebody’s thinking, simply trying to redirect their attention may not be enough. And this research concerned attitudes towards genetically modified foods, not animal rights. We should therefore resist turning an interesting finding into another universal rule.
Sometimes misinformation needs correcting. Dangerous claims should not be allowed to circulate uncontested simply because confrontation can be uncomfortable. But correction is a tool.
It is not the only tool.
Stop Letting Opponents Choose The Conversation
Animal advocates spend enormous amounts of time reacting. Industries make claims. We rebut them. Defenders of captivity make claims. We rebut them. People defending the consumption of animals make claims. We rebut them. Again and again, those defending animal exploitation get to decide what we are talking about. This research suggests we may sometimes be better off refusing the invitation. We can present another fact. Raise another consideration. Activate another belief. Ask another question.
Instead of endlessly trying to remove every brick from somebody’s existing worldview, sometimes we may be able to build a stronger argument somewhere else. The goal of advocacy is not to win arguments. It is to change attitudes, behaviour and ultimately the systems that imprison, exploit and kill animals.
If correcting misinformation helps us do that, correct it. If going around it works just as well, stop wasting time arguing with the wall.