Psychology of eating meat
[1] Research into the psychological and cultural factors of meat-eating suggests correlations with masculinity, support for hierarchical values, and reduced openness to experience.
[26][31] People experience the taste and texture of meat in significantly different ways, with variations across ages, genders, and cultures.
[36] The perceived risk of food contamination can affect consumer attitudes towards meat, as after meat-related scares such as those associated with mad cow disease or bird flu.
[43] A study of Dutch consumers found that both rational and emotional responses to environmental and other concerns affected purchasing of organic meat.
[8] A study of British eating patterns found that meat was often associated with positive food traditions, such as the Sunday roast.
These consumers' trust in quality assurance organizations, and individual relationships with meat providers, have been reported to significantly affect their purchasing behavior.
"[48][49] Internal dissonance can be created if people's beliefs and emotions about animal treatment do not match their eating behavior, although it may not always be subjectively perceived as a conflict.
[52][53] The dissonance that arises out of the meat paradox generates a negative interpersonal state, which then motivates an individual to find the means to alleviate it.
[63] A 2010 study randomly assigned college students to eat beef jerky or cashews, then judge the moral importance and cognitive abilities of a variety of animals.
Compared with students who were given cashews, those who ate beef jerky expressed less moral concern for animals, and assigned cows a diminished ability to have mental states that entail the capacity to experience suffering.
[59][60] Another study showed that rearing animals for slaughter led to less recognition of mental states in cows and sheep for those who expected to eat meat.
[1] A 2016 review drew an analogy between the meat paradox and sexual objectification, writing that both practices involve strategically changing perceptions of others when thinking of them as potential "resources" (i.e., for meat or sex), and citing 2010s studies suggesting that sexually objectifying people prompts a reduction in their perceived humanness and moral importance.
[78][79] Similarly, the meat industry often prefers euphemisms like "processing" or "harvesting" over "slaughter", which may serve to create emotional distance and make the use of animals more palatable.
[80] The importance of dissociation processes was supported by a 2016 Norwegian study which, in a series of experiments, directly tested the effects of making live animals more salient.
[81] In addition to dissociation, people who experience discomfort relating to the meat paradox may simply avoid confrontation of the issue.
Cultural socialization mechanisms may also discourage people from thinking of their food choices as harmful; for example, children's books and meat advertisements usually portray farm animals as leading happy lives, or even desiring to be eaten.
[86] A series of studies published in 2015 asked meat-eating American and Australian undergraduates to "list three reasons why you think it is OK to eat meat."
[87] Studies in personality trait psychology have suggested that individuals' values and attitudes affect the frequency and comfort with which they eat meat.
[96] Research also suggests that omnivores score higher in dark triad traits (though not at pathological levels) compared to vegetarians, though the correlations are low, as well as limited due to the small number of vegetarians/vegans available and may also largely be an artefact of gender differences in meat consumption (as males score higher in Dark Triad traits and are also more likely to eat meat; controlling for gender tends to reduce correlations to statistically insignificant levels).
[89] A detailed study of personality characteristics and diet in Americans characterized the self-descriptions of increased meat consumers as "pragmatic" and "business- and action-oriented", after correcting for gender differences.
This contrasts to the United States, where vegetarians are motivated to avoid eating meat by universalism and concerns about animal welfare.
[112] It has been suggested that meat consumption makes men feel more masculine, but it remains unclear whether this is the case and how this may be affected by social context.
[102][104] In the course of human evolution, the pressures associated with obtaining meat required early hominids to cooperate in hunting, and in distributing the spoils afterwards.
In particular, a 2016 study offered an interpretation of moral disengagement as a motivated reasoning process which is triggered by loss aversion and dissonance avoidance.
