2020 has been a strange and eventful year for human society. Fortunately our work has proceeded largely without hindrance, but I want to first and foremost extend our sympathy and support to the Sentience Institute community.
Our budget this year has been spent almost entirely on research. Now that our operations are fully set up as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and we employ no administrative staff, and because we have operated as a fully remote team since before COVID-19, we only have a few operational expenses, such as website hosting and postage. We have hit our stride, efficiently publishing the research that we expect will do the most good and sharing that research with the stakeholders who can best make use of it. This includes cultured and plant-based food companies, activist organizations, policymakers, other researchers, individuals choosing their career path, and individuals and foundations choosing where to donate.
While there are a number of research organizations studying the most effective strategies for helping animals, we have carved out a crucial niche with our big-picture, longtermist focus on "moral circle expansion." Our research is aimed not just on helping animals in the next few years, but ensuring that humanity ends factory farming and that after factory farming the moral circle continues to expand to groups such as wild animals and artificial sentient beings.
As always, we are extremely grateful to our supporters who share our vision and make this work possible. If you are able to in 2020, please consider making a donation.
Accomplishments in 2020 (To Date)
Research
- We published Institutional Change and the Limitations of Consumer Activism in the academic journal Palgrave Communications. We have discussed institutional change at length in our work, arguing that it is usually a more effective strategy than the farmed animal movement’s historically heavy focus on individual change. This paper provides a one-stop summary and explication of that argument.
- We published two social movement case studies on the US Anti-Death Penalty Movement and the US Prisoners' Rights Movement. The circumstances of prisons’ rights activism require it to be primarily ally-based, more similar to animal advocacy than most social movements, which are victim-based. The reports provide evidence that a narrow focus on legal strategies discourages the growth of a grassroots movement and makes a movement more fragile, that legislative change is possible without public support, and that incremental improvements can discourage fundamental improvements.
- We published our first experiment on The Effects of Animal-Free Food Technology Awareness on Animal Farming Opposition. We found that, holding certain factors equal, telling people about plant-based and cultured meat reduces opposition to animal farming. While this does not mean we should avoid extolling the benefits of vegan food, it suggests caution in how we do so.
- We published our first literature review, an extremely thorough and expansive project on Health Behavior Interventions. This includes a wide range of insights from the huge literature on health behavior, which can be implied to a variety of strategic dilemmas in encouraging people to eat fewer animal products.
- We updated our Foundational Questions Summaries and Research Agenda.
In-Progress Research to be Published in Coming Months
More detail on our in-progress research is available in our Research Agenda.
- Two chapters in a textbook on cellular agriculture. (In-press. Expected publication mid-2021.)
- A paper analyzing the results of our Animals, Food, and Technology survey, focused on the individual-institutional gap and creating two survey scales: Animal Farming Opposition (AFO) and Animal Product Alternatives Support (APAS). (Data collection finished and manuscript drafted. Expected publication late 2021.)
- A paper on moral circle expansion, targeted at philosophy and ethics journals. (Manuscript drafted and submitted. Expected publication mid-2021.)
- A paper on COVID-19 and factory farming. (Manuscript under review. Expected publication early 2021, but delayed due to COVID-19 time delays with the published.)
- A paper on the nature of consciousness and how this can help us understand non-human minds. (Finishing the draft. Expected publication late 2021.)
- A literature review of the moral consideration of artificial entities. (Finishing the draft. Expected publication late 2021.)
- An experiment on perspective taking and moral consideration. (Early-stage work. Expected publication 2022, or earlier if not submitted to an academic journal.)
Outreach
- We published an op-ed in New York Daily News, titled “Joaquin Phoenix is right: Animal farming is a moral atrocity,” which expands on Joaquin Phoenix’s discussion of factory farming in his 2020 Oscars speech. This got more than 16,000 upvotes on Reddit and was shared widely on Twitter and Facebook.
- We gave a number of talks, such as a presentation of our paper “Institutional Change and the Limitations of Consumer Activism” at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association and presentations to animal advocates in Portugal, Australia, and the U.S.
- We published nine more episodes of the SI Podcast. While we want to stay focused on our research, we are happy with the reception of these occasional podcast episodes with activists and academics working on animal advocacy and related topics. In 2021, we currently plan to spend less time on the podcast.
- We got our main scholarly reports listed on Google Scholar. This is an important step in helping academics and other researchers easily find our work.
- As in previous years, we had conversations with many stakeholders to share our research findings and advise them on specific strategic decisions.
2020 Spending
So far this year we’ve spent $85,363, broken down approximately as follows (87% research, 9% outreach, 3% admin):
Room for More Funding
We continue to be a funding-constrained organization. The marginal funding that enables us to make a new hire is generally around $55,000. In each of our previous hiring rounds, we had multiple excellent research candidates, so we are confident we can continue to make outstanding research hires. In fact, in our 2020 hiring round, we had 123 applications, far more than previous rounds. Of those applicants, there were at least seven whom we would have been very happy to hire, including the one we did hire. Take a look at our agenda for an idea of the research that we could conduct with new staff.
We currently have a solid runway for our existing staff. We aim to raise $90,000 by the end of this year to enable us to make a new research hire. If we raise above that amount, we expect that we can continue spending it in similarly cost-effective ways up to at least $180,000.
If you are uncertain whether to make a donation to Sentience Institute, please feel free to email me at jacy@sentienceinstitute.org. Due to COVID-19, our funding situation is less secure than usual, so we especially appreciate your consideration of our work. You can donate via PayPal or by check.