About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 27. Solicited Content: Global South

Abstract

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Colombia is one of the eight countries in the world where bullfighting is permitted. However, Congress has recently decided to ban this practice starting in 2027 (Buschschlüter, 2024). The ban was approved after a lengthy process that involved multiple debates about the legitimacy of bullfighting and the consideration of animal rights. While bullfights are considered an act of animal cruelty in many other countries, supporters argued that these events are integral to the country’s cultural heritage, and a form of art (Villena, 2021). However, as Colombia prepares to ban bullfighting, little is known about how younger generations perceive this practice prior to its prohibition. Specifically, how do young children and adults view bullfighting? Do they consider attending bullfights to be morally right? What elements do they include in their justifications for their moral evaluations? This study aimed to address those questions.
Participants included Colombian third graders (N = 32), seventh graders (N = 32), and undergraduate students (N = 32) who were shown a silent video, illustrating various stages of a traditional bullfight. Following the video, participants were asked to imagine they were with a classmate who had not seen the video and to narrate what happened for their friend. They were then presented with a hypothetical scenario in which a character decides to attend a bullfight and were asked to evaluate whether this action was okay or not okay. Their ratings of the action’s severity were also obtained (from 1 = very good to 5 = very wrong). Additionally, participants were asked to justify their judgments. All interviews were conducted when bullfights were still permitted. Interviews were audio recorded and subsequently transcribed.
Our results revealed that participants did not support attending bullfights. Specifically, 80% of the participants stated it was wrong to attend a bullfight, and they tended to rate it with the greatest severity, with no differences by grade level (Figure 1). Additionally, 78% of participants mentioned the intrinsic value of nature in their justifications. Also 21% of participants argued that attending bullfights meant sponsoring harm to animals. These findings suggest that participants do not perceive bullfighting as a highly valued cultural tradition. Despite it, being a legal practice at that time—which they may have heard of or even participated in—they judge it as morally incorrect. The coding of participants’ narrative content is currently underway and will be completed by December. Preliminary coding suggests that participants do not view bullfights as part of their cultural traditions or as a form of art. Instead, they tend to focus on how the bullfighter’s actions cause significant suffering to the bull.
The results of this study contribute to our understanding of how communities in the Global South morally view these cultural traditions. Furthermore, these results are fundamental for informing how policies, such as banning bullfights, will be received by the population—especially by younger generations—when implemented.

Author information

Author	Role
Lizette Pizza, Harvard University	Presenting author
Roberto Posada, Universidad Nacional de Colombia	Non-presenting author

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