Animal welfare
Farm animals and wild animals suffer in horrible ways in great numbers. At Rethink Priorities, I contribute to various projects aimed at addressing this important problem.
Willem Sleegers
Senior Behavioral Scientist at Rethink Priorities
About
I’m a Senior Behavioral Scientist at Rethink Priorities. I am part of the survey team, which means I conduct research on attitude assessments and attitude change, using surveys and experimental designs. Before joining Rethink Priorities, I was an assistant professor in the Department of Social Psychology at Tilburg University. On this website you can find information about some of the projects I’m involved in. I also blog about various topics related to my work.
Projects
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Blog posts
Voting behavior of Dutch political parties on animal welfare motions
animal welfare
data cleaning
APIs
politics
Not too long ago the House of Representatives of The Netherlands released a public portal to a lot of their data. The portal contains data on law proposals, motions, rapports, etc. I’ve been interested in this kind of data for a while now because I want to know more about the voting behavior of political parties. Specifically, I want to know which parties consistently vote in favor of improving animal rights. It’s relatively easy for a political party to say that they care about animal rights, but that doesn’t mean they consistently vote in favor of motions that improve animal rights. So let’s figure out how the open data portal works and which party to vote for.
Animals slaughtered in the Netherlands
animal welfare
data cleaning
data visualization
In this post I take a look at how many animals are slaughtered in the Netherlands. The goal is to find and clean the data to answer this question and to get a better grasp of exactly how many animals are killed here every hear. It’s both an exercise in data cleaning and calibrating one’s beliefs about this topic, as this is something that’s too easy to avoid thinking about, while probably being one of the most important things you should think about.
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CV
I’m an Senior Behavioral Scientist at Rethink Priorities. I have recently left academia after having built up 10 years of research experience, with publications of both scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, as well as software publications. It should be no surprise then that my skill set consists of research skills (e.g., experimental design, data analysis, writing) and technical skills (e.g., programming). I now look forward to applying my skills to topics of great impact together with my colleagues at Rethink Priorities.