Abstract
Three groups of participants (largely recruited from the UK) completed a survey to examine attitudes to the use of animals in biomedical research, after reading the lay (N = 182) or technical (N = 201) summary of a research project, or no summary (N = 215). They then completed a survey comprising the animal attitude (AAS), animal purpose (APQ), belief in animal mind (BAM) and empathy quotient (EQ) scales. The APQ was adapted to assess attitudes towards the use of animals for research into disorders selected to be perceived as controllable and so 'blameworthy' and potentially stigmatised (addiction and obesity) and 'psychological' (schizophrenia and addiction) versus 'physical' (cardiovascular disease and obesity), across selected species (rats, mice, fish pigs and monkeys). Thus, the APQ was used to examine how the effects of perceived controllability and the nature of the disorder affected attitudes to animal use, in different species and in the three summary groups. As expected, attitudes to animal use as measured by the AAS and the APQ (total) correlated positively with BAM and EQ scores, consistent with the assumption that the scales all measured pro-welfare attitudes. Participants in the two research summary groups did not differentiate the use of rats, mice and fish (or fish and pigs in the technical summary group), whereas all species were differentiated in the no summary group. Participants given the lay summary were as concerned about the use of animals for schizophrenia as for addiction research. APQ ratings otherwise indicated more concern for animals used for addiction research (and for obesity compared to cardiovascular disease in all summary groups). Therefore, the information provided by a research project summary influenced attitudes to use of animals in biomedical research. However, there was no overall increase in agreement with animal use in either of the summary groups.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0290232 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 18 Aug 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Funding: This work was in part supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council https://www.ukri.org/councils/bbsrc/ [grant number BB/S000119/1] awarded to HJC, CWS and CB. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2023 Cassaday et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
