The psychology of eating meat: guilt and social status

Stijn Bruers, IARG, July 2011

Introduction

• 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 disengagementBilewicz 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 griefElisabeth 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• 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 trapValues <> 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 illusionsIntrinsic value of animal

Intrinsic value of human

Morally irrelevant properties

Ethical illusions

Meat consumption

Antidiscrimination

Basis right of sentient humans

Ethical illusions

Anthropomorfisms

Any questions?