Why are vegans so preachy, and does it hurt the cause?

The objection

“Vegans are so preachy and self-righteous it puts people off. They’re hurting their own cause.”

The answer

Some vegan advocacy is counterproductive: shaming, smug, more interested in being right than being heard. If you’ve been lectured at and it put you off, that reaction is human, and advocates should be kinder and more strategic than they sometimes are, starting with how they talk to friends and family. “You’re being preachy” is still a claim about the speaker, and it settles nothing about whether what they’re saying is correct. Used as a reason to dismiss what vegans say, it is the ad hominem fallacy in its politest dress, and a convenient one, because once the messenger’s tone counts against the message, you never have to examine the message at all. Whether preachiness costs the cause support is a separate question, and a fair one.

Are vegans really that preachy?

Some are, but research on vegetarians suggests meat eaters expect more judgement than they actually get, and that the resentment can be stirred without a vegetarian saying a word. In Minson and Monin’s 2012 studies of university students, meat eaters thought vegetarians would see a moral gap between the two groups almost ten times wider than the one they saw themselves, and nearly half of the 47 asked what came to mind about vegetarians offered at least one negative word, “preachy” and “self-righteous” among them [1]. The authors’ name for this is do-gooder derogation, and their second experiment, with 255 meat eaters, shows how little it takes: simply asking people first how vegetarians would judge them, without telling them anything new, lowered their ratings of vegetarians [1]. A small follow-up of 67 students, 24 of them vegetarian, found that vegetarians did look down on meat eaters’ morality a little, though less than meat eaters expected, which led the authors to suggest the backlash may be a pre-emptive strike against an exaggerated threat [1].

Vegans who cite ethics get the harshest judgement. In MacInnis and Hodson’s 2017 studies, meat eaters rated vegans below vegetarians, and rated people who gave animal rights or the environment as their reason below those who gave health [2]. Activists of other kinds get a similar stereotype: Bashir and colleagues (2013) found feminists and environmentalists alike were seen as eccentric and militant [3].

Why do vegans keep bringing it up?

Vegans keep bringing it up because they believe animals are being exploited and harmed on an enormous scale every day, and people raise their voices about what they believe is a serious wrong. The Vegan Society, a UK charity, defines veganism as a way of living that seeks to exclude, as far as it practically can, all exploitation of and cruelty to animals [4]. Nobody campaigns about your curtains. You may think vegans are mistaken about animals, which is a separate argument and the one the rest of this library takes up, but if the belief is true, the passion is what consistency looks like, and the strange thing would be to believe it and stay politely quiet.

Does preachiness hurt the cause?

Aggressive tactics and the activist stereotype can both cost a cause support, though classes making the case against eating meat have been followed by students buying less of it. In six experiments, Feinberg, Willer and Kovacheff (2020) found people supported a movement less when it used extreme protest such as blocking roads or vandalising property; animal rights was among the movements tested, and in five of the experiments support for the movement’s central cause fell too [5]. The authors note earlier research showing that such tactics can pressure institutions and raise awareness, a trade-off they call the activist’s dilemma [5]. The stereotype does harm on its own: in Bashir’s studies, seeing activists as eccentric and militant made people less willing to affiliate with them and, in the end, to adopt the behaviour they promoted [3].

The classroom evidence comes from the University of California, Riverside, and the classes offered more than an argument. In a study published in 2020, 1,332 students in four philosophy classes taught in 2017 were split, though not fully at random, between a week on the ethics of eating meat and a week on the ethics of charitable giving (Schwitzgebel, Cokelet and Singer) [6]. The meat group read a ten-page article by James Rachels arguing that eating meat is unethical, were sent a link to an optional 11-minute advocacy video with factory-farm footage, which a third of those surveyed said they watched in full, and discussed the reading in 50-minute groups, all led by vegetarian teaching assistants [6]. Among the 495 students whose campus food receipts could be matched, the share of purchases of $4.99 or more containing meat fell from 52% to 45% in the meat group and stayed at 52% in the charity group, and the authors estimate the drop lasted at least several weeks [6]. They add that it remains unclear which part of the instruction made the difference [6].

A follow-up by the same team, published in 2023, tested two of those loose ends with 730 students in autumn 2019: half the discussion groups were shown the film in class, and most of the teaching assistants this time ate meat [7]. Among the 113 students whose receipts could be matched, the share of purchases of $4.99 or more containing meat fell from 51% to 42%, while in a comparison group of 226 students outside the classes, chosen by neighbouring student ID numbers rather than at random, it went from 52% to 53% [7]. Most of the drop came in the film groups, from 51% to 37%. In groups that only read and discussed, it went from 50% to 47%, too small a change to tell apart from chance, though across all their purchases, snacks and drinks included, those students did buy meat less often (30% to 25%), a result only just past the usual threshold for statistical significance [7].

Students taught by meat-eating assistants cut back about as much as those taught by vegetarians, and assistants who were open about being vegetarian did not seem to put their groups off [7]. Across the seven classes the team reported on in 2023, students whose assistant said they were vegetarian signed an anonymous pledge to skip factory-farmed meat for a day more often than those whose assistant said they ate meat (39% against 22%), though the assistants chose for themselves whether to say [7].