The psychology of eating meat:
guilt and social status
Stijn Bruers,
IARG, July 2011
Introduction
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Guilt
Social status
Brain research
Moral illusions
Guilt
• Claim: a large group of meat eaters (20-40%?)
feel really uneasy about their meat
consumption (although they would not admit
it),
and they suppress their feelings of guilt, using
a lot of psychological strategies.
They continue eating meat mostly due to
social pressure (or lack of knowledge).
Guilt: cognitive dissonance
• Eating tomatoes violates the right to be round
and juicy…
• Rationalisations: 150 logical fallacies, 90%: more
than 2 counter arguments
• People often react by eating more meat
• Eating meat, animals or corpses?
Guilt: empathic distress
• We don’t want to kill a chicken with our own
hands and teeth
• 85% of Americans don’t want to kill an animal,
not even with a knife
• In traditional cultures: Rituals for killing
animals
• Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress (Rachel
McNair 2002; Jennifer Dillard 2008)
Guilt: Moral confusion
• Eating dogs? (Melanie Joy)
• We should not torture animals for our
pleasure, but…? (Gary Francione)
Guilt: Moral disengagement
Bilewicz et al., 2010
• Meat eaters and veg*ans believe animals feel primary
emotions (pain, pleasure)
• Veg*ans ascribe more secondary emotions (grief, guilt,…)
to animals than meat eaters do. Meat eaters more
strongly believe secondary emotions are uniquely human.
• Meat eaters see a stronger moral distinction between
primary and secondary emotions
• Meat eaters ascribe less secondary emotions to edible
animals than to non-edible animals!! Veg*ans see no
difference between edible and non-edible animals
-> human uniqueness is strategy for moral
disengagement
Guilt: Ideology (carnism)
• normal, natural and necessary (Melanie Joy)
Guilt: Moral blind spot
• Denial (Jeffrey Masson)
• Rational ignorance and rational irrationality
(Caplan, 2001)
• “Wir haben es nicht gewusst”
• “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
(President Thomas Jefferson, 1776)
Guilt: The 5 stages of grief
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression (feeling lack of control, hopeless)
• Acceptance
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as
being self-evident.” (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Guilt: Evolution in society
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Increased concern about discrimination
Increased knowledge of biological sciences
Increased concern for animal welfare laws
Increasing dissociation animal origin – meat
Decreasing transparancy
– Increased transparancy > less meat consumption, but only
for people with universalistic values (Hoogland et al, 2005)
• Social pressure (peer pressure, media, bystander
effect…)
-> We’ve created a trap
Values <> an animal holocaust!
Reasons to eat meat
• Ignorance factor:
– health concerns
– lack of knowledge / deception
• Selfishness factor:
–
–
–
–
taste
habit
money
ease
• Social factor:
– peer pressure (fear)
– social status
Social status
• Claim: a large group of people (40%?) eat
meat, not for the taste (although that’s what
they claim), but for their social status (social
power & dominance)
They will deny this social status influence
upon them
Status: Taste & prejudices
• 10.000 vegan recipies
• Using spices to flavour meat
• Taste of a product is influenced by value system:
better taste evaluation if there is a value-symbol
congruence (Allen et al. 2008)
• Meat is symbol of social power and inequality
(Adams 1995; Fiddes 1991; Heisley 1990; Twigg
1983)
– seeking authority, wealth, social recognition,
preserving one’s public image, pressuring others to go
along with their preferences and opinions
Status: Language & symbols
• A hierarchy of animal products (cfr. cars)
• Use of language (“Steak à point”, but not
“Carrot al dente”?)
• French words: pork, beef, foie gras (French
aristocracy). But chicken? Fish?
Status: Values & meat identification
• Heavy meat eaters endorse social power more
than vegetarians (Lea & Worsley, 2001)
• Meat attitudes (red meat) related to
conservative values, inequality and hierarchy
(Allen & Sik Hung, 2003)
• Nutritional (dis)value not important for meat
identifiers
Status: Men and women
• Man behind the BBQ
• Vegetarian men are not real men (Steven
Heine, 2011). Most women prefer meat eating
men. (Vegetarian men are considered more
virtuous)
Status: Aggression
• Fibre prevents testosterone excess. Animal
products contain no fiber -> vegetarians are
less likely to be aggressive and domineering.
(Boston University’s School of Medicine, 1989)
Status: Taste & prejudices
(Allen et al., 2008)
Brain research
• Different brain activity between omnivores,
vegetarians and vegans, looking at human and
animal negative scenes
-> empathy towards humans and animals have
different neural representations (Filippi et al.,
2010)
Ethical illusions
Intrinsic value of animal
Intrinsic value of human
Morally irrelevant properties
Ethical illusions
Basis right of
sentient humans
Meat consumption
Antidiscrimination
Ethical illusions
Anthropomorfisms
Any questions?