Research into consumer psychology around pig welfare reveals the factors that drive welfare-positive purchasing decisions and the barriers that prevent stated values from influencing buying behaviour.
Understanding consumer psychology is essential for designing effective campaigns for pig welfare improvement. Research reveals that the conventional approach - providing information about suffering and hoping consumers respond by purchasing differently - is largely ineffective at scale. More effective approaches work with rather than against cognitive biases: making higher-welfare default, reducing the decision effort required, using social norms, and linking welfare to values already important to consumers.