The Psychology of Eating Animals

The Eaters

The surest way to eliminate moral tension associated with eating animals is to not eat them. Vegetarians experience no conflict between their beliefs about animal harm and their dietary practices. Studies of vegetarianism have revealed that moral concern regarding the raising and slaughter of animals is a principal motivation for eliminating meat consumption (Amato & Partridge, 1989; Ruby, 2012). In addition to motivating dietary change, valuing animal welfare helps sustain and moralize vegetarian diets (Rozin, Markwith, & Stoess, 1997). Vegetarians avoid the meat paradox through a behavioral choice driven by moral concern for animals.

Nevertheless, vegetarians seldom exceed 10% of any national population—most people consume meat. The primary motivation omnivores report is that meat tastes good (Lea & Worsley, 2003). Its appetitive qualities likely reflect an evolved preference for foods high in fat, protein, and calories (Stanford, 1999). However, meat can also elicit disgust, arguably because it poses a higher risk of carrying dangerous pathogens than plant material (Fessler & Navarrete, 2003). This oral disgust can also be a moral disgust for some, providing an emotional base for their moral avoidance of meat (Rozin et al., 1997). People’s feelings toward meat are therefore ambivalent, and the balance of pleasure and disgust helps determine who eats meat and who rejects it (Rozin, 1996, 2004; Rozin et al., 1997).

Some meat eaters find their consumption less morally problematic than others. Two political ideologies underlying this individual difference are authoritarianism, the belief that it is acceptable to control and aggress against subordinates (Altemeyer, 1981), and social dominance orientation (SDO), the endorsement of social hierarchy and inequality (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). Research has found that omnivores are higher in both factors than vegetarians and that omnivores who value inequality and hierarchy eat more red meat than those who do not (Allen & Baines, 2002; Allen, Wilson, Ng, & Dunne, 2000).

People may also eat meat because it expresses their identity. At a personal level, meat consumption is tied to male identity, and its consumption makes some males feel like “real men” (Rothgerber, 2013). The association is so close that meat has become metaphorically “male” (Rozin, Hormes, Faith, & Wansink, 2012), such that meat eaters are perceived as more masculine than vegetarians (Ruby & Heine, 2011). Rejecting meat can also help express valued identities. A recent cross-cultural study of vegetarianism found that Indian vegetarians value their in-group and respect authority more than omnivorous Indians do (Ruby, Heine, Kamble, Cheng, & Waddar, 2013). This finding indicates that the decision to reject meat may be tied to a sense of belonging to a cultural group and endorsement of group values.

In sum, the psychological characteristics of eaters may influence their appetite for eating animals. People for whom meat is a moral issue of animal welfare are inclined to eschew it; people who accept or endorse domination and inequality eat meat eagerly. Hedonic and identity-related motives also play important roles.

The Eaten

Understanding how people think about animals—the eaten—offers insights into the psychology of meat eating that complement those based on understanding the characteristics of eaters. In particular, an animal’s perceived mind and its perceived similarity to humans are key factors influencing people’s willingness to eat it.

Eating animals is morally troublesome when animals are perceived as worthy of moral concern. The more moral concern we afford an entity, the more immoral it becomes to harm it. People show considerable variability in the extent to which they deem animals worthy of moral concern (Bastian, Loughnan, Haslam, & Radke, 2012). This variability is partially determined by the extent to which animals are perceived to be capable of suffering. The idea that an animal’s pain sensitivity can determine its moral worth dates back to Jeremy Bentham (Bentham, 1789/1907), who argued that “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (“Limits Between Private Ethics and the Art of Legislation,” note 122). Psychologists have corroborated Bentham’s point by finding that the perceived capacity for subjective experience—including the capacity for pain—partially underlies the extent to which entities are deemed worthy of moral concern (Waytz, Gray, Epley, & Wegner, 2010). If perceived pain sensitivity partially underlies moral concern, reducing animals’ capacity to suffer might facilitate eating them.

Several recent studies have found this to be the case. We (Bastian, Loughnan, et al., 2012) asked people to rate the extent to which each of 32 animals possessed a set of mental capacities and their willingness to eat each animal. We found a strong negative relationship between attributed mind and edibility. Eating a more “mindful” animal was also judged as more morally wrong and more subjectively unpleasant. These findings hold across diverse samples, with other research showing that American, Canadian, Hong Kong Chinese, and Indian consumers report less willingness to eat “mindful” animals and more disgust at the thought of doing so (Ruby & Heine, 2012).

These findings may reflect that omnivores reduce animals’ minds to justify the fact that they are eaten. Alternatively, omnivores may simply choose to eat “mindless” animals. To test whether animals are viewed as relatively lacking minds because they are eaten, we asked American participants to rate the extent to which a tree kangaroo was capable of feeling pain and deserved moral concern (Bratanova, Loughnan, & Bastian, 2011). Participants were told either that the animal was considered food by locals in Papua New Guinea or simply that it was an animal living there. Even though participants had never eaten tree kangaroo and did not belong to the group that did, tree kangaroos framed as “food animals” were judged less capable of suffering and less deserving of moral concern. Simply being categorized as food undermines an animal’s perceived mind.

The perception of animals as relatively mindless may also contribute to the belief that they are dissimilar to humans. Plous (1993) showed that an animal’s perceived capacity to experience pain was strongly related to its perceived similarity to humans. People not only judge humanlike animals as more pain sensitive but also experience greater autonomic arousal when watching them being mistreated (Plous, 1993) and recommend harsher sentences for people who abuse humanlike animals (Allen et al., 2002). By implication, seeing an animal as dissimilar should dampen our emotional reactions to its suffering. Indeed, people who see animals as dissimilar to humans attribute them lesser minds and consequently see them as less worthy of moral concern (Bastian, Costello, Loughnan, & Hodson, 2012). This decreased moral concern may be reflected in an increased willingness to allow animals to be harmed (e.g., for meat or for entertainment; Bastian, Costello, et al., 2012).

Attributing animals lesser minds and reducing their perceived capacity to suffer is a powerful means of resolving the meat paradox. Another, hitherto unexamined, possibility is that people might accept that animals can suffer but deny that animals suffer when humanely killed. By limiting animals’ capacity to suffer, people can judge them less worthy of moral concern. Interestingly, reducing the perceived minds of meat animals occurs when people are not seeking to justify their own consumption—for example, when they categorize an animal as food (Bratanova et al., 2011) or when they contemplate the differences between humans and animals (Bastian, Costello, et al., 2012). These findings indicate that the psychological processes that support eating animals cannot be reduced to self-serving, motivated reasons; how we construe animals and the human/animal boundary is critical to our willingness to eat them. In short, the way animals are perceived is intimately tied to eating meat.

The Eating

Personal attributes and perceptions of animals are relatively independent of the act of eating. However, it is precisely in this moment—when a person is eating or intending to eat—that we would expect the meat paradox to require urgent resolution. Research has begun to examine the dynamic processes that facilitate meat eating.

In one study, we (Loughnan, Haslam, & Bastian, 2010) randomly assigned participants to consume either beef or nuts and, subsequently, to report their moral concern for animals and rate a cow’s capacity to suffer. We found that participants who had recently consumed beef, but not nuts, restricted their moral concern for animals and rated the cow as less capable of suffering. This response may have served to alleviate any post hoc negative feelings participants experienced as a result of eating meat. A similar emotion-regulation process may occur in anticipation of eating meat. In another study, participants came to the laboratory and were led to expect to sample meat or fruit (Bastian, Loughnan, et al., 2012). Participants who anticipated meat consumption attributed cows and lambs lesser minds, consistent with previous research showing that both situational and chronic meat consumption lowers mind attribution (Bilewicz, Imhoff, & Drogosz, 2011; Loughnan et al., 2010). Importantly, people in the meat condition who ascribed diminished mentality to the animals reported less negative emotional arousal when anticipating meat consumption. This finding suggests that people can alleviate unpleasant feelings aroused by meat consumption by attributing animals lesser minds.

The tension omnivores experience when reminded that their behavior may not match their beliefs and values, and the resolution of this tension by changing those beliefs, fits with the theory of cognitive dissonance (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999). Whereas some people (e.g., vegetarians) reduce this negative state by changing their actions, others may do so by strategically changing their beliefs, specifically about animals’ minds, suffering, and moral standing. Dissonance theory could help explain why the act of eating, which makes the meat paradox highly salient, motivates these psychological changes.

Conclusions

Eating animals has been commonplace for millennia. Nevertheless, it can generate a significant tension between people’s aversion to animal harm and their desire for meat. We have examined some factors that enable people to negotiate this paradox. Meat eaters tend to care less about animal welfare, to value masculinity, and to accept social hierarchy and inequality. They tend to reduce mind attribution to animals and see them as dissimilar to humans. In preparation for eating meat, and after it, they attribute diminished mental capacities to animals. These factors combine to reduce animals’ moral standing, making their passage from farm to fork less troubling. There are a number of pathways through which people may adjust their perceptions of animals in ways that appear more consistent with their consumption of them. One putative pathway is that people change their perceptions to reduce negative affect associated with the act of meat eating. Still, no work has directly captured these negative affective reactions to the tension between concern for animal suffering and consumption of animals. Future research could employ physiological or neuroimaging measures of affective reactions (cf. Plous, 1993) that would allow researchers to capture rapid, nonconscious, or disavowed emotions associated with meat.

Although we believe that the psychology of eating animals is a worthy topic in its own right, it can also be viewed as an extended case study on human morality. Psychological approaches to understanding morality have typically focused on domain-general cognitive and emotional processes (e.g., Greene, 2007; Haidt, 2001) and broad, encompassing moral categories (e.g., Haidt & Joseph, 2007) or dimensions (e.g., Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012; Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Hepp, 2009; for a discussion, see Rozin, 2006). By examining a single moral behavior, we can illuminate how emotions (pleasure, disgust, guilt), cognitions (categorization, attribution, justification), and personality characteristics (values, beliefs, identities) combine when people face everyday moral problems. In doing so, researchers have shown how emotion regulation, mind perception, and moral judgment are intimately connected. Adopting a similar approach to understanding other domains of everyday morality—narrow in its focus but deep in its attention to the complexity of the phenomenon—may prove equally fruitful.

In 1996, Paul Rozin made an appeal in this journal for psychologists to take meat eating seriously (Rozin, 1996). The field has heeded his call and responded by laying bare many of the psychological factors at play when people eat meat. We now have a clearer idea about who eats animals, what they think of animals, and how their psychology changes when they engage in meat eating. In doing so, we have begun to unearth the psychological roots of an ancient, widespread, and increasingly controversial behavior.