Animal Equality showed that advocating for diet change works. But is it cost-effective?

Abstract

Individual outreach for improving the lives of animals has a lot of possible interventions. While empirical evidence to help us understand and decide between these interventions has improved a lot over the past five years, there remain significant limitations in methodology. Previously, only the the 2016 AWAL Newspaper Study (see announcements from the Reducetarian Foundation and from AWAL) has the first statistically significant effect about individual outreach on actual meat reduction (as opposed to a proxy metric) using an actual control group with sufficient statistical power[1]. Now, a new study by Faunalytics, with cooperation from Animal Equality and Statistics Without Borders, enters the picture, purporting to find that video (in both 2D and 360-degree virtual reality) produces statistically significant diet change when compared with a control group (see the full report, all the relevant data and code, Animal Equality announcement, and the Faunalytics announcement). Does this finding hold up?