Authors: Nicholas Tan, Brock Bastian, and Luke Smillie (2024)
What’s the article about? (At a glance)
The ‘meat paradox’ encapsulates the conflict many people feel with regards to eating animals. Realising that one’s dietary practices contribute to harm to animals can be unpleasant. One way of reducing these negative feelings is by denying that farmed animals have sophisticated minds or suffer much. Of course, there are likely vast individual differences with regards to who experiences the meat paradox.
This Open Access PHAIR paper by Tan et al. (2024) explores how personality traits and ideological attitudes impact on how meat eaters experience and resolve the meat paradox via mind denial. Across two studies, self-identified omnivores were reminded of the harm involved in rearing farmed animals (cows or pigs) when considering meat-based meals, or they were not reminded of harm – similar to methods used by Bastian et al. (2012). Measures of mind attribution and negative affect were collected after the harm description. Participants also completed a range of personality and ideological measures such as Big Five personality traits (e.g., Openness to experience, Emotional volatility), preferences for inequality and group-based hierarchy (known as ‘Social Dominance Orientation‘) and conservatism. This way, the research team was able to explore whether participants’ responses to the harm information would be stronger or weaker depending on their personality traits and ideological attitudes.
Study 1 (N = 311) replicated the findings of Bastian et al. that harm descriptions led to lower mind attributions than the absence of harm – though negative feelings were unrelated to mind denial. Participants with higher (vs. lower) levels of Social Dominance Orientation and conservatism exhibited, overall, more animal-mind denial. Additionally, participants lower on Openness and higher on Emotion volatility engaged in more mind denial after learning about animal harm than those higher on Openness and lower on Emotion volatility.
Study 2 (N = 232) separated the harm information into “moderate” and “high” levels of harm, and sought to replicate and extend the findings of Study 1. Replicating Study 1, more mind denial occurred when participants read about the harm to farmed animals, and, this time, negative feelings correlated significantly with mind denial – that is, those who experienced more conflicted feelings exhibited more efforts to deny minds to farmed animals. The moderating effects of personality were less clear in Study 2, though Openness and Emotion Regulation Ability correlated with less mind denial.
Implications for advocacy
Knowing one’s audience and how they may respond to advocacy messages is important for optimising the effectiveness of advocacy efforts. The present findings highlight the need for targeted animal advocacy interventions that take into account the personality profile of audiences. Certain segments of the population are unlikely to respond sympathetically to messages about the suffering of farmed animals.
Based on Tan et al.’s findings, individuals higher in Social Dominance Orientation, conservatism, and Emotion volatility, and lower on Openness, are more likely to respond to such ‘harm’ messages with defensive reactions – for example, denying farmed animals minds – as a way of minimising the negative feelings caused by the meat paradox. By contrast, individuals higher in Openness and those better at regulating their emotions, may be more likely to respond positively – or at least less defensively – to such messages.
Blog post by Jared Piazza
Cover photo by Lucia Macedo
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