Bastian and Loughnan (2017) on Eating Animals and Morally Troublesome Behavior

Brock Bastian and Steve Loughnan, “Resolving the Meat-Paradox: A Motivational Account of Morally Troublesome Behavior and its Maintenance.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 21(3): 278–299, 2017.

• The “meat paradox”: meat eating is widespread (about 97% of Americans), but so is revulsion at harming animals.

• How can morally troubling behavior be ignored, normalized, and longstanding?

• Cognitive dissonance is a term that refers to the discomfort people feel by holding beliefs that are inconsistent with their actions. Eating meat is inconsistent with an interest in not harming or killing innocent sensitive beings; so, meat eating is a source of cognitive dissonance.

• Cognitive dissonance leads to negative affect, and this condition motivates the search for ways of reducing or eliminating the dissonance.

• “When people take responsibility, acknowledge harm, and accept the identity relevant consequences of their actions, they will experience dissonance and cease their immoral behavior [p. 280].” So, people try not to take responsibility, not acknowledge harm, and not accept the identity implications of meat eating.

• How to reduce dissonance while still eating meat? We can deny that animals suffer; we can do this selectively: we can categorize some animals as “food animals” and act as if that label means that they don’t count or don’t suffer – even as we would never hurt a puppy. The food animal category makes salient the food dimensions (such as taste), and the other dimensions (sentience) become less salient.

• Another approach to fight dissonance is to act as if we are not responsible for our choice to eat meat, that we effectively have no choice, as with the "3 N’s": eating meet is natural, normal, and necessary. People who abstain from meat then appear deviant, their opinions are suspect.

• Further, we can downplay the amount of meat we eat or suggest that we only consume ethical meat. We emphasize that we are relatively responsible!

• Our approaches to dissonance reduction can increase the commitment to meat eating. Indeed, doubling down on meat eating and believing that it is the proper course to take (and that the alternative is weird or unwise) reduces dissonance and negative affect. 

• The ritual and symbolism then, in meat eating (turkey for Thanksgiving, ham for Christmas!), is not surprising. Not eating meat looks almost infeasible and anti-social.

• The habitual, automatic nature of meat eating renders it no longer a decision, reducing dissonance – and this is in part why meat eating becomes habitual.

• Habits can spread throughout a population – seeing someone eating meat suggests that the eater is not experiencing dissonance, that such behavior is consistent with morality.

• The whole culture, then, can shroud the immorality of meat eating (and reduce or eliminate dissonance): look at how nations build identities around morally questionable acts of war. Meat production is hidden away, meat purchasers and eaters don't have to face harms to animals directly.

• But social contagion can work both ways. The positive feedback (sorry) loop could reverse, and meat eating could quickly fall out of favor.

• The theoretical points built up around the discussion of meat eating are then applied by the authors to the treatment of refugees and to prejudice. The authors see their contribution, I believe, mainly in indicating how methods employed to reduce dissonance can strengthen the commitment to the morally-troublesome behavior.