Status: Under active development
LIME is a website to explore and analyze a continuously growing database of studies examining psychological interventions to reduce animal product consumption and improve attitudes towards animals. With LIME, you can explore individual studies, understand the current state of research, and evaluate which interventions have the strongest evidence behind them.
The suffering of farmed animals is, in my opinion, one the most glaring moral blindspots of our time. Their suffering is so clear and so vast that much should be done to try and reduce the consumption of animal products (for more on this, see here).
One of the ways to reduce animal product consumption is through interventions based on psychological principles. Fortunately, a lot of scientific studies have been and are being conducted to see which interventions are effective. These include interventions such as leafleting, showing videos with factual or emotional content, changes in food labeling or menu design, and in-person classes and discussions.
The trouble is, though, that it is difficult to find out what exactly is being tested and how strong the evidence is in favor of a particular type of intervention. Interventions are tested in different countries, with different samples, and using different methodologies. Results are also scattered across reports by advocacy groups and published and unpublished papers across various academic fields (e.g., psychology, economics, medicine). In other words, it is difficult to find, understand, and synthesize the evidence. For advocates and policy makers, who often have limited experience with searching the academic literature and who are not familiar with many methodological and statistical intricacies, actionable insights remain difficult to extract. Thus, a comprehensive and easily understandable summary of the literature is extremely valuable.
Narrative reviews and meta-analyses attempt to summarize the evidence and both approaches have been applied to the literature on meat reduction interventions. However, these approaches have significant shortcomings that limit their usefulness. Studies differ on dozens of dimensions making it difficult to narratively compare them and to draw inferences about which factors contributed to the effectiveness of an intervention. Meta-analyses aim to address these shortcomings by synthesizing evidence in a quantitative way. They offer various additional insights into the strength of the evidence (e.g., tests of publication bias) and the role of different features in shaping the effectiveness of an intervention (e.g., meta-regression). However, existing reviews and meta-analyses of meat reduction interventions, which are usually published as research papers, have various shortcomings that limit their usefulness. They are often limited in scope, only focusing on one type of intervention. They contain a limited set of analyses that may not address many questions that readers may have (e.g., how effective are leafleting campaigns in Europe vs. the US?). Finally, they only provide a brief snapshot of a quickly accumulating evidence base.
LIME is a potential solution for the limitations highlighted here because it is both an extensive database of randomized-controlled trials of meat reduction interventions that will be updated with results of future studies and a website consisting of customizable analysis tools for exploring and synthesizing the evidence in an accessible manner.
LIME is definitely a work in progress still, so if you have any feedback, feel free to share it!