 Good afternoon, everyone. Can everyone hear me okay? Perfect. Our next session is on communicating about ethics. Our session today is about providing information about how scientists can communicate effectively their values and ethical considerations regarding research with animals. Our speaker for this presentation is Dr. Adam Shriver. He's the director of wellness and nutrition at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy. Much of Adam's research has focused on the intersection of ethics and cognitive science, and he's written multiple articles about human well-being and animal welfare. Adam has written about the relationship between pain and pleasure, the legal and ethical questions that arise from the search for a neural signature for pain in humans, and the capacity for suffering across different species. You have his bio, so I'm going to stop there and I'm going to turn the session over to Adam. Thanks, Candice, and great to see you again. I guess I thought I would start out with a poll. If we are ready to do that, I don't know how much queuing up we need, but just kind of curious to see where different people are coming from when we ask about ethics and animals. Okay, so is the poll visible? Oh, okay. I couldn't see it on my monitor. Looks like we're slowing down a little. There were a lot of words in this poll, so yeah, excellent. Yeah. Okay, so we're good. All right, that is interesting. The option I was terrified with or the result I was terrified with was everyone said they had some view that was not captured by any of the options. So I'm glad to see that there were, I was roughly, you know, approximating some people's views. So the first view was basically a consequentialist position, which is that if the benefits outweigh the harms, then actions that involve animals might be permissible, ethically permissible. And the second one is that there's some things that are right or wrong and that seemed to independently of the consequences and that seemed to take the lead. So great. Thank you. That is very interesting. All right, so can we remove the poll from the screen. So in the spirit of the, okay, cool. In the spirit of drawing upon previous sessions, I wanted to give my eight second pitch of what I think the presentation is, which is basically that it's important to recognize the difficulty. Of ethical questions about animal research, and to communicate that we all recognize that difficulty. So that's going to be the point I'm going to try to drive home today. And now that I have, you know, triumphantly achieved this PR victory of getting, getting, getting it into eight seconds I am now going to proceed with a bunch of slides that are very text heavy and dense because I have a limitation of how much PR savvy I can ever do at one time. But I will say first that just a little bit about where I work so I'm at the Harpen Institute for public policy and citizen engagement. It was an institute at Drake University that was founded when US Senator Tom Harkin retired he had a long career in public service, and it focuses on different themes that were related to his work. So labor employment people with disabilities retirement security and wellness and nutrition are the big themes, but everything I'm going to say here is just my own views doesn't represent the views of the Harpen Institute. I will also say a little bit about my own background. Candice nicely mentioned a few things. So I'll just be quick but I got my PhD in an interdisciplinary program at Washington University in St. Louis called philosophy neuroscience psychology, which was a philosophy program where you were also required to take 24 credit hours of graduate level courses in these other fields. And then I did postdocs a brain in mind Institute at Western University in London, Canada, the University of Pennsylvania Center for medical ethics, the UBC animal welfare program and the Oxford you hero center for applied ethics. So, so I've had a lot of interdisciplinary experiences, but from, you know, being in the audience and and taking in what's been talked about so far. I really want to lean quite heavily on the philosophy side of things and why I think philosophy can be useful for this discussion and specifically the philosophical underpinnings of ethics. So, I guess one question you might ask right at the beginning is, you know, what do you mean by philosophy what what what exactly part of it is important. And there's different definitions philosophy of course means the love of wisdom. And I'm not so concerned with what the exact subject matter of philosophy is as much as I want to just point out that there's this methodological feature that is often associated with philosophy, which is that it's grappling with really difficult questions where there's no clear cut method for determining an answer. Right, so, if we want to know what the temperature is in this room. There's a fact of the matter what the temperature is, and we all kind of have a rough sense of what we would do to figure it out. There's complicated questions like, which parts of the brain are involved in visual perception. And, you know, maybe a lot more goes into that, but there's still something that, you know, we have a rough idea of what method we could use to answer that question. But philosophy is really generally grappling with questions where there's no agreed upon straightforward way to sort of get the answer where everyone's going to just be like, Oh, okay, that's, that's the right way to approach it. And that's part of why some people really love philosophy. And it's also part of why a lot of people really dislike philosophy is because there's not this, you know, there's not the straight path towards getting the answer. And, and it's not and the people who dislike it. I'm not, it's not. I think it's really kind of almost a personality thing where you know you can be someone who's quite brilliant in many ways but who just doesn't sort of enjoy that type of question. So I don't mean it as a, as a particular type of criticism. But I will say in in philosophy's defense to the people who really dislike it is we historically have had this phenomenon where once philosophers get really you know actually come across a good method for answering a question, then it ceases to be a philosophy like biology for example was came from Aristotle and psychology came out of philosophy as well. So, so, you know, the successes kind of go go into another field as soon as as soon as we actually reach agreement but the point I want to emphasize is just it's dealing with really difficult questions. Okay, so why is this relevant for today's workshop or today and yesterday's workshop about communicating about research on animals. Well I will argue that it's relevant because you can't fully avoid philosophy. If you're talking about values. There's no clear cut path towards telling people what, what values they should have. So it's a philosophical question and the way that I just framed what philosophical questions are. And you can't avoid talking about values. If you're taking a position on whether and to what extent we should be engaging in a particular form of research. There's no more research to be any kind of research but by engaging by choosing to fund engage and participate in certain practices, we're expressing a set of values right that's that's a reflection of what we do to be important as a society. And just to kind of summarize that the practice of science is not entirely value free. Right, there's, there's values built into what we choose to study how we choose to regulate what we study. You know who gets funding those types of things. I would add that if you think that you're engaging in a value free practice of science, what you are actually doing is engaging in a science where the values are unexamined. And if there's one thing I can tell you the philosophers don't like it's unexamined things, really, that just really bugs us. And I got to say, I think in this case, I am biased but I think we're right about this one I think I think it's, it's not a good thing to have an examined values when it comes to, when it comes to science. It's important to be reflective about these questions. I also just want to point out just because of the terminology sort of close enough that I am not taking the position that science can't be objective. So this is a sort of different kind of claim, then, you know, so I'm just saying that as we choose to practice certain and do certain types of science we are taking a position, but that's a different type of claim from sort of more like postmodern view that, you know, anything that has a viewpoint on the world has to be subjective. That's an interesting debate but that's not what I'm talking about so I just want to kind of flag. I mean something different when I say it's not value free. Okay. So, another thing I wanted to point out is that, you know, it's kind of come up a few times in this workshop this idea of emotions and how emotions influence some of these conversations. And I think it's important to point out that values and emotions are not the same thing. Right there and it's not saying that you value something isn't the same thing as have saying that you have an emotional reaction to that thing. It's a way that we could strive to have make decisions about the practice of science that's more or less free from emotion. Right. I said you can't have a value free science but I think you could have a motion free science in some sense where it's not you know motivated by being in an emotional state. And then I'll sort of refer back to this idea and a little bit and why I think it's important. Okay. To get into that. I think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes in a disagreement. If two different sides. That disagreement might be resolved if both sides of the disagreement agree on a relevant set of facts. There are sometimes we have a disagreement, but it's just because we're getting different information and if you get, you know, you, everyone agrees on the facts then you say oh yeah okay now now we would reach the same conclusion. Now of course this seemed much more true 20 years ago I have to say where nowadays it seems like even basic facts sort of are up for grabs and a lot of public conversations and in strange ways. It's not that they're actually up for grabs but just that people don't agree on basic sets of basic facts but any event, there are some types of disagreements like that. But there are other types of disagreements about values. In those cases, it's not just a matter of explaining or educating the other person, you know, it's a genuine disagreement, people have different values, and it's not just a case where, if you educate that other person, they're then going to agree with you. And importantly, that doesn't necessarily mean that the other person's judgment is clouded by emotion. We just have a different set of values. And it's important for us to be aware of that and acknowledge it. Okay, so what are some examples of this that I think are important so I you know I think I think we need to be aware of the different sets of values that people have and to, you know be willing to engage with those different values. So what are some examples where this can be important. Let's start with a quote from John Rawls who's a philosopher at Harvard, who says moral theory is the study of substantive moral conceptions that is the study of how basic notions of the right, the good and moral worth may be arranged to form different moral structures. Okay, so that's a little, you know, heady. The basic idea is that there are different notions of moral concepts and what ethics is is the study of these different concepts and how they relate to one another. And so some of these terms he's using in a specific way so I'll point those out so this notion of right is, you know, if you're asking whether a question is right or wrong, whether it's something that's morally permissible, whether it's morally obligatory where it's morally forbidden. That's a type of question about individual actions, whether they're right or wrong. The good on the other hand is talking about how we evaluate states of the world. And so you can ask what types of things are good or bad. And then moral worth in this case is about what we might call virtues and vices so different character traits that people might have. So you can ask questions about all these different types of concepts. And you can also ask how they relate to each other how how do these different notions, how does the answer to one question inform or not inform an answer to another question. Okay, so the most kind of, you know, straightforward example of how they relate to each other is a theory called consequentialism and ethics. You know, it's sort of a, you know, big sounding word but the basic idea is just, you know, if you're evaluating what's right or wrong. All you need to know really is what consequences result from that action. And so if the consequences that result from it are good or, you know, good enough, then you could say that the action is right. And if the consequences that result from it are bad, then you could, then you would say that, you know, the action is wrong. And as we saw in the poll, a lot of people have a view similar to this when it comes to thinking about animal research right and that the, if the benefits that come out of it outweigh any potential harms, then, then we could say that that practice is justified. So utilitarianism is kind of a more familiar, familiar word than consequentialism, but utilitarianism is just basically a version of consequentialism where you say all that matters is the consequences and what the consequences are are just positive and negative mental states so the best actions are those that promote happiness and prevent unhappiness or prevent suffering. Okay, so one thing to note is that human bioethics, as I'm sure everyone in here knows, is very unapologetically non consequentialist right there are rules that the IRBs follow that will say that certain types of research is forbidden. It doesn't matter what potential scientific benefit could come out of it right if you don't get informed consent, you can't do certain types of research, if you don't have fair subject selection, you can't do certain types of research, even if that research is going to results in some really great benefits to society or you think it's likely to. So, human bioethics is very non consequentialist. I want to highlight kind of an extreme version of non consequentialism just to drive home. Why I think that these differences in values are getting at something really fundamental and are worth worth taking seriously so. I have ski in the brothers Karamazov has this passage that's kind of famously known as the grand inquisitor passage where one of the characters is talking to the great inquisitor, and he presents the character with this dilemma. He says, imagine that you're creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death, only one tiny creature. Would you consent to be the architect of those conditions. The idea is, you know what if you could have this utopian society at the cost of one, in this case it was a baby, you know one baby, having this miserable, you know, sort of tortured existence would you be willing to make that trade off. So the consequentialist should say, yes, of course, you know you should do that because the overall consequences outweigh the negative consequences, but a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that conclusion right because it's quieting there's something about it that that can bother us to say that it's okay to do that to one individual for the sake of even, you know this incredible amount of positive consequences. And so I think you can also ask this question and there are also sort of longer treatments of this so Ursula Le Guin has a nice book that kind of talks about this theme as well. And also, you know, ask this question about, what about someone who looks at an individual lab animal, and has that same thought, you know that it doesn't matter what consequences would result from it. It's just wrong. I don't share that view, you know I think that you know if you have this question of what you know what if you had to cause a little bit of distress to 10 mice. A little bit of distress to 10 dogs but it prevented thousands of dogs in the future from having distress. To me it seems like, okay yeah that probably is the right thing to do you should do that you should do that research. I also think there's something, you know I think we have to acknowledge that there's something powerful and meaningful about taking that individual life, really seriously about, you know, saying, looking at that individual creature, whether it's a dog or a dog in this case, and saying, like, I empathize with that feeling I take it seriously it's meaningful. And so I understand where people who have that position are coming from and I think it's a, it's an important position to to recognize and to value even if it's ultimately one that I don't agree with. So that's kind of, yeah what I'm, what I'm getting at when I say that we need to recognize that these value questions are not just straightforward it's not just as simple as knowing the right facts or avoiding emotions but you can sort of see how people might have different intuitions on some of these cases. I'll give you a few other things quickly so the other type of moral concept I mentioned is moral worth. So that has to do with things like character having a good character or not having a bad character. And, you know, it turns out that, as I'm sure many people in here know that the character traits of people who take care of animals is something that matters quite a bit to the public, right. I'm thinking it's a lot of agricultural research, but or sorry, studying public views about agriculture, and, you know, people care a lot about whether the farmer cares about their animal, and, and it's just sort of a good person. But that actually you know might conflict with different views that say well the only thing that matters is really the welfare of the animal right the animal, the animal doesn't care if this person is well intentioned or not the animal just cares if you know what they're what their experience is, but that's not really how a lot of people think about it so again there's this kind of conflict in different intuitions where some people might say character should be totally irrelevant. And other people take it really seriously as something that's important. And so all of these different concepts, the right, the good character. There are a lot of different ways in which they interact with each other on different views. And I think a lot of people implicitly or explicitly have different values when it comes to those things. They might be having a discussion about ethics, and really be talking past each other, because they don't share the same way of thinking about these different types of values. So I'll mention a couple other questions about value that I think are important to be aware of when we're thinking about animal research. There are a lot of cross species comparisons. So, you can ask, how do you compare the lives of humans with the lives of other species in moral decisions. You know, some people would say you just can't compare them at all. Other people say everything, you know, every being should be equal right so got that bell curve idea that we referenced the other day. Similarly you could ask, how do you compare the experiences of humans with the experiences of other species and moral decisions so not just a life as a whole but you know individual experience of different creatures. And even if you think the comparison between humans and other species isn't interesting on your view, you know, it comes up in animal ethics or animal research ethics, you know comparisons between other species right this whole idea of replacing more cognitively sophisticated animals with less cognitively sophisticated animals comes down to certain questions about, you know, how do you compare moral moral value on these different species. I just mentioned this project from a group called rethink priorities that they called the moral weight project, and I consulted a little bit on this, where they tried a number of different methodologies to try to get at this question of how do you evaluate the welfare, the sort of moral value of welfare of humans versus other species. And this this is their set of numbers. And I have to say, you know I worked on different things related to this project for two years and I'm not sure after those two years I feel any more confident about about it because it's just such a wickedly hard question of how do you compare across species but there are groups that are really interested in this question of how you, how do you make these decisions and these trade offs. And it's very relevant for your views on animal research because if one person thinks that, you know humans are completely incomparable. But someone else doesn't have that view, then you're going to you're going to have different conclusions based on values not necessarily based on what what backs you believe. Relatedly, we can ask questions about aggregation so aggregation meaning you know if you're counting up different things happening to different numbers of individuals and making predictions about the future. So, you know of course we're up before. If we're being consequentialist about the future we're always making decisions about what we expect to happen rather than what we know will happen because we never have complete certainty. And so you can ask this question about how do you calculate the expected benefits or expected harms of the future. How do you treat cases where there's a really low probability of something happening, but if it happens it has really huge benefits. And there's been a lot of discussion about that in ethics recently. So, you guys have probably heard about Sam Baker and freed obviously but he was also very associated with this notion of long termism and long termism is this view in ethics. That's going to sound pretty wild to some of you, maybe including me, but the idea is basically that if you do an action now that influences the far future, because they're going to be so many more humans that live in the far the expected utility of that action is really really high, even if the probability of your action actually making a difference is very very low and you can sort of play around with the numbers to get to get it to where it sounds plausible but the basic idea is that we really should always just be focused on the far future, because the chances of having really huge benefits are so great. So that's kind of a, you know, it's a strange view here's another strange view for your entertainment, called the repugnant conclusion, where if within philosophy there's a view called or there's a argument called the repugnant conclusion about a world that no one would want to live in. And this philosopher of animal ethics, how to play on this called the repugnant conclusion where he basically argued that even if there was this really small chance that nematodes were conscious. There are so many nematodes in the world that if you were, you know, taking a pure utilitarian calculus that that you actually should be you know devoting all your efforts to protecting nematodes just because there there's so many of them so anyways the point is, these are very strange views that can result from this question of. What do you do in cases where there's really low probability of something being true but huge value, you know huge potential stakes at risk. And there's plenty of, you know, these examples show and also there's lots of examples just from how people make choices in their own life that people don't really follow a strict notion of goodness multiplied by probability formula for making choices about how we act. So there are tough questions about how do you aggregate, you know, is it really the case that doing research on a certain number of individuals to to put that has a low chance of making a huge impact in the future. How do we think about that, and there's not, there's not a straightforward answer about how all people think about that. And Mike, I think it comes down to value more than, you know, not knowing how, how multiplication works. Okay, so to to kind of wrap up so what I hope to have shown is that there are a lot of different value judgments that can get you different evaluations of what you think about examples of animal research. And I think it's really important to question that and to be aware what other value systems other people might have. And so I want to present two different visions of, you know, what the, what the right way is to approach the world so on one vision. You've got this supremely confident individual who, you know, looks you straight in the eye and says, don't worry, we've got it all figured out. This is the right way to proceed. This is the correct way to think about this. And, you know, you don't need to you don't need to worry about it. Another vision is someone who grapples with this really difficult question who says, oh yeah I can understand why people have that intuition I get why that value system is one that people might share. I understand why people are really upset about what happened to this one individual, even if it resulted in a lot of other really positive things happening down the road. And I think, in my mind, you know, there's no doubt that that first approach is what's going to, you know, the unwavering confidence approach is what's going to be persuasive to people in the short term if you're trying to just like convince people, you know, to pass a certain bill or to like win an election or agree with your stance on a particular issue. But I also think that there's something missed. If we abandon this approach to the world where we're questioning where we're grappling where we're acknowledging where questions are really difficult and we don't have a clear cut method that everyone agrees on for answering it. But maybe another way of putting it is, you know, are we interested only in winning an argument, or are we interested in seeking the truth. And I don't mean to put it that like bluntly as like, that's, you know, there's only these two options and it's always the same answer because unquestionably, there are many cases in the world where you do need to persuade other people. And it is important to just, you know, win an argument or sort of successfully persuade other people so I'm not, I don't mean to put that as like the bad thing that's opposed to the truth. But I do think we also need to leave room for, you know, keeping questions open, not assuming that all of the answers have already been provided. You know, asking how closely these questions are aligned with each other. Okay, so my summary of what I am trying to convey is that I think we need to embrace the messiness of ethical questions. We need to embrace the uncertainty of ethical questions. I think we need to embrace the difficulty of ethical questions. They're not straightforward. They're challenging that's why they're in the field of philosophy rather than other fields because there's not a totally agreed upon method for answering them. I think we need to embrace our roles as scholars and as the how and think about how a scholar approaches a question where there's no easy answers. And even if someone doesn't necessarily think of themselves as a scholar. I think you should, you can adopt that mentality as something that's worth living out in the world. And we need to understand the fact that different views about values can underlie different disagreements. And so if someone's disagreeing with us doesn't mean that they're overly emotional doesn't mean that they're necessarily factually misinformed, they might just have a different set of values. And, and that's worth respecting. And finally, as respected leaders as you know everyone in this room is and people at home watching on zoom. We can demonstrate to the world how to approach challenging questions and to demonstrate that they're worth taking seriously. So that's my presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Shriver. Again, if you have any questions online, please post them in the q amp a. I might have a question then. So, so what have scientists been neglecting and they're in analyzing or assessing their own values. I mean, you know, and then how can they best communicate those to the general public. I guess I don't necessarily think there's reason to think that scientists haven't been examining their own values, but my point is really just that it's important when we're engaging with other people who might have different views on research that their views might just be informed by the by a different set of values. It doesn't have to mean that they're factually uninformed. It might be that they just have a tremendous amount of empathy for the life of an individual. And I think there's something, you know, kind of beautiful about it, even if the messy real world you can't always follow that. So, yeah, so I guess I'm not I don't mean to imply that scientists have not thought about their own value systems as much as it's just, it's important to be aware of how many different possible systems that are out there and and to take them all seriously. Other questions. Alice. Thank you very much, Adam that was wonderful. My question is, I understand what you're saying about the confidence versus the questioning approaches. What happens if you believe in the questioning approach, and you want to follow that. And you need to communicate with someone with a confidence approach. Okay, so, so one individual has the questioning approach, and they they're interacting with someone with the confidence approach and they're wondering how to how to handle that situation. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a, it's a pretty difficult challenge that you could imagine or that I'm sure it does arise many cases in the real world. And I don't think there's any algorithm that we can follow that's just going to say in this situation you should shift to acting confident yourself versus in that situation you should, you know, you should adopt the questioning view. But I do just think that, you know, you have to leave space for that that questioning approach and I'm not I'm not answering your question very very well but it's almost like you have to kind of feel out when, when you think it's appropriate and why not. So, sorry, did not have a better answer. Margaret. Adam, thank you I thought that was a great talk and I love the dusty esky quote, which I was unfamiliar with but help me. Help me imagine a number of things. And the non consequentialism of clinical trials. That's relatively recent when you say I mean if you go back in time. There was very consequentialist approach to even the use of humans in experimental studies. And so the definition of the non consequence non consequentialism is 50 60 years ago or so. And I just mentioned that because we still struggle in the animal space so it's not that that it's always been the same in the human space I just wanted to point out. That's a really interesting observation so I think the term non consequentialist is fairly recent. I mean I think if you look at how people made decisions they probably made decisions in ways that we would call non consequentialist now in certain cases. But you're right and when it comes to human research and the rules that govern it. A lot of the rules that are that kind of jump out as being really non consequentialist are rules that have arisen in the last 100 years or you know as part of the different responses to you know scandals like Nazi experimentation and Tuskegee and those types of things so so definitely. Yeah, that it's not it's not a static set of rules it has evolved in the human case and it's possible that it could evolve in the case of animals so so one example of something that would technically be non consequentialist is if you if you had an upper threshold of distress that an animal could have in an experiment so there's some countries that have rules right like that right so that's something where it's saying it doesn't matter what consequences result from it you can't go above this threshold would be an example of that. I had another one but maybe you're going to be on the panel right and it dealt with Peter singer and species himself you want to think about that I'll get to it later. Joe, we have time for one more. Thanks Adam great presentation was wondering from a philosophical standpoint when you're talking and going into the arena of discussing ethical animal use for research. I find that it's very difficult unless you build a societal impact of how society can have differing ethical values about the use of animals across the spectrum, and then build to the focal ethical discussion about biomedical medical ethics and comparing that. Is that a philosophical technique or is that a way to to approach that that that subject. That's an interesting idea so can you say more about how that would go in a talk. So, I typically will like throw a slide up that shows, and then I'll give a personal approach to. I used to hunt for sport, and then I had an experience that now I only will hunt unless I'm putting food on my table. And I don't hunt for sporting more but I still fish, or I, I did research using animals, I had a bad experience and now I have changed my ethical stance about or I use food and fiber for my clothing. And so all the different approaches our society has towards the use of animals versus the smaller subset which is the use for biomedical research or other animal uses and in wildlife and other stuff so. And then go into discussion about what are the ethical consequences of making decisions about the, and we struggle with this all the time then the risk benefit analysis of the use of that animal or the pain and distress that animal may suffer or experience. Yeah, that's great I mean I guess. So, roles who I referenced earlier had this idea of what he calls reflective equilibrium where he thought you have this kind of moral theory but then you test it out by looking at individual cases so it might be. So hunting for sport might be an example of something where if you have a strong intuition about that that might inform what your theory is. But then you look at a different type of case like being vegetarian and maybe your intuition is different in that case and so. So he saw it as this kind of interplay between specific instances and this overarching theory values that that guides behavior. So being honest, unfortunately for philosophers probably a lot of people don't necessarily have some like pure, like, and probably not even most philosophers have this like pure set of rules that they like consistently follow that actually describes how they make choices in every possible situation. So, so the real world's more messy than than the idea that you can fit everything under one theory that perfectly describes everything. But, but I do think that's a it's a it's a valuable way of helping people understand what their values are. If you present them with specific cases where they where you draw out their intuitions and then, and draw implications from what their intuitions are about specific cases. Excellent. We're going to stop the questions here there are a couple in the comments I'm going to hold these for the final session. They're really good so but we're going to take a break. Nia to 245 or to 15 minutes. And then this is a screenshot from a video of a student who is talking about his research. So again different ways that people can share things that you can support your colleagues by sharing the content that they post. Okay, so a few tips for effective engagement. So your audience for each platform we talked a little bit about this, you've got Twitter that has or x that has a very academic presence there's a lot of conversation that goes on with scientists on x. And then you've got, you know, Facebook where you're probably not going to reach the younger generations with what you post. So an effective or a more effective method might be to be on multiple platforms to try to reach different audiences. So platform limitations we've talked about some of them like x with their caption or their, their character limits or Instagram with the captions not having clickable links. Make it easy for your followers so regarding the clickable links one thing that we do. And what a lot of different pages do is that in their bio, there is a single link at the top of a bio on Instagram. And it will take you to a page that has links to all of the articles that you post. So it makes it so if I post about, you know, this bearded dragon, someone can just go to the top of the Instagram page click that link, and they'll be able to find the article so it's not buried in a caption and it's not difficult for them to find. That's how we get people to read things right we need to keep the number of clicks that they have to do to a minimum. So make sure your content is really positive. There's so much negativity out there these days and people really are attracted to the positive messages the pictures the animals. So really try to focus on that. And be sure that you are assessing your reach and or impact don't you know if if all you can do is post and not worry about anything else that's fine it's better than nothing but if you can take a few moments to say, which of these posts were most effective. And who liked this one who didn't you know where in the demographically who did I reach with this. It's worth just a few minutes of your time. A few of the lessons that I have learned through running these different social media platforms read before you share so sometimes titles can be deceiving and even the beginning of articles can be very deceiving so be sure that what you're sharing is a message that you want to get across because if you don't have the time to read it and somebody else does and they then associate that with your account it can do a lot of damage so be sure you're actually looking at what it says and know that the positive that comes from sharing on social media far outweighs the negative from years of experience of doing this I can tell you that I have had far more positive interactions and experiences on this the negative matters similar to the content the titles, make sure that the images in the article are supporting the message that you're trying to get across. If you even if the article itself has really great content. If there's a picture and all they do is click on that link and see that picture and that maybe doesn't give the best picture. That's what they're going to remember so it may mean that some articles that are really good don't get shared because you know that that's just not ultimately there's a risk that it's not going to put across the message that you want. And we have talked about this multiple times attention spans are short. If you're making videos, make them short. If you're using captions, keep them brief, don't use a lot of words. People are quick to scroll by things so it's there are lots of ways for you to make an impact on social media it really shouldn't be a scary thing I know for some who maybe are not comfortable with it yet it can be but we are here to help you. I hope you all will consider following Brad on social media and potentially beginning by sharing some of the content that we share. This QR code will bring you to a page on our website that has all of these links so we'll make it very easy for you to find our social media platforms. And as a little challenge for everyone who is watching this workshop today participating. I want to thank all of you by the end of the week to do one of these two things so for those of you who don't have a social media platform yet. Please create one pick a platform, create an account, and just start playing around getting comfortable. And if you do already have an account on one of these platforms. By the end of the week I challenge you to post one thing about animals and research it can be shared from someone else. It can be one that you create using your new account on Canva. So, please please this is a really easy quick step it's something that is actionable that we would love to see you doing that is what everyone person does. We can make a really big impact so if we have everyone I don't know how many are on right now but if we have every single person do this think of the reach that we will get just by the end of the week. I really appreciate your attention. I hope that this was informative and helpful and thank you again for the opportunity to speak today and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Thank you Logan. That was a fantastic presentation, and so much to learn from that. I'm so honored you had 165 people listening to you directly. And very quickly, we'll just do one question for the sake of time, and I'm going to combine because these questions all have the same theme. So, someone says I get the value of sharing research animal research theme content and social media. But what's your advice for an institution that is already in the crosshairs of anti animal research activists, especially given that social media tend to attract the most vitriolic of comments. There is another question that has a similar theme speaking to why poke the bear. How do you handle negative comments, which are inevitable on social media. Because this everybody can hear me in terms of an organization or an institution that may already be in trouble. I don't think I think the theme here is that being quiet is not the answer that telling sharing the fact sharing the good staying positive talking about what you are doing with the animals that is a good things don't don't talk about the issue that is potentially at the forefront of all of the other media articles but share and highlight the good things that are happening in terms of negative comments. They have happened they do happen sometimes and there are different ways to address them and I actually work with the amp team quite a bit when this does happen to just say okay what would you do in this situation. We find that sometimes engaging online is not always productive so there are different ways if you think it maybe you certainly can attempt to I know that I have had personal message back and forth with people who have commented if I have. I have had a friend who posted something on their own page about a dog project and I message turns that hey I just want you to know like let's talk about this and gave her some of the information we had a dialogue back and forth. And then she actually changed what she deleted her previous post and changed what she had posted so those types of interactions can be really positive if you feel if you have the energy to do it. The facts to do it if you feel like it's going to be productive. If it's not and if you have someone who's really inflammatory there are a few options you can hide their post on your pages so that they don't know that you've hidden it they can still see it they think it's there but no one else can see it. Or you could respond to them if you feel again if you feel that that's lucrative or you could if you wanted you could delete their post or block them from your page we really don't do that much we want the whole purpose of being on social media is to share information. And if we're blocking out those people who are making those comments and they're not getting the information that we're trying to get across so I think they're there are different ways to handle it and it is very situational dependent. Thank you for that I think that's a tough one for many many scientists and what I'm hearing is scientists should not silence themselves because of concern that there might be negative comments. Agreed. Great. Well I know we have a fantastic panel lined up and I'm sure there are going to be many more questions for you. So I'm going to kick things back to those in the room so that they can get the panel discussion started.