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
Authors: Julie Pedersen & Steve Loughnan (2024)
Link to the paper (Open Access)
What’s the article about? (At a glance)
Might drawing consumers’ attention to the animal-bodily origins of dairy milk (e.g., its basis in cow lactation) and the potential for pathogen risk reduce consumer interest in dairy? Pedersen and Loughnan (2024) recently explored this question in a registered report published in PHAIR.
In Study 1, they had participants reflect on the bodily processes by which dairy cows lactate or digest their food. The lactation vignette emphasised the potential for “bacterial contamination”, whereas the digestion vignette emphasised the role of gut bacteria in the breaking down of grass. Participants indicated how disgusted they felt about consuming dairy milk and their willingness to consume it before and after the intervention. Relative to reading about digestion, thinking about cow lactation increased disgust towards dairy milk, which in turn reduced willingness to consume it.
In Study 2, a similar pre-post procedure was used, though the digestion condition was replaced with a neutral condition, where only baseline information about cows was presented. Participants indicated again how disgusted they felt about dairy milk, but the researchers also offered participants the opportunity to eat milk chocolate buttons to measure the intervention’s impact on dairy consumption. The lactation information, again, increased feelings of disgust towards dairy milk, but there was no difference in milk chocolate consumption (serving size) between the lactation and neutral conditions.
Together, the studies demonstrate how thoughts about the animal origins of dairy milk, linked to the bodily processes involved in mammalian lactation and pathogen risk, can momentarily reduce appetite for milk and a willingness to consume it. However, these momentary attitudinal effects did not translate into actual reduction, at least not in terms of eating milk chocolate.
Implications for advocacy
Studies have shown that pathogen-linked disgust can be a strong deterrent of food consumption (see previous PHAIR blog on meat disgust). The Humane League for example found that fish consumers were particularly troubled when learning about the potential for disease transmission within fish farms. One key direction for future work then is working out how these body and pathogen-linked concerns about dairy products can be harnessed to truly shift consumer decisions and increase the uptake of plant-based alternatives. Long-term changes in dairy consumption may require more personal and recurrent encounters with the unpalatable aspects of dairy production.
PHAIR post by Jared Piazza
Cover photo by Max Saeling
Authors: Nora Bennigstad, Hank Rothgerber, & Jonas Kunst (2024)
Link to the paper (Open Access)
What’s the article about? (At a glance)
Meat-animal dissociation is when people fail to ‘see’ animals in meat or suppress thoughts about the animal origins of meat. In this PHAIR article, Bennigstad et al. (2024) distinguish between two types of meat-animal dissociation:
(1) active dissociation, where a person actively suppresses thoughts about the animal origins of meat (e.g., when an animal reminder is present);
(2) passive dissociation, where a person fails to think about the animal origins of meat when interacting with meat (e.g., because a product is familiar or habitually eaten).
The authors developed a scale that reliably distinguishes between the two forms of dissociation (e.g., active item: “I actively avoid meat that visibly reminds me of an animal”; passive item: “Animals rarely come to mind when I eat meat”) (Study 1). They found that both active and passive forms of dissociation are stable (Study 2); and explored active and passive orientations among meat industry workers and general consumers (Study 3).
Implications for advocacy
It may be useful for advocates to distinguish between these two forms of dissociation when building interventions. Passive dissociation may be especially problematic for animal advocacy because it may be indicative of a habitual relationship with meat. Indeed, Bennigstad et al. found that passive dissociation had a consistent positive relationship with meat consumption (Study 1). Furthermore, passive dissociation increased with time spent working with meat (Study 3), which may highlight the role of habit in its maintenance.
By contrast, active dissociation may be a sign that a person is ambivalent about meat and open to reduction, since they are actively trying to suppress problematic thoughts about meat in their daily lives.
Part of the work of advocates is to increase the visibility of animals exploited for food. But an equally important effort may involve finding ways to bring consumers’ thoughts to animal exploitation when they interact with animal products.
PHAIR post by Jared Piazza
Cover photo by: Markus Spiske
PHAIR Society 