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. 

White and Perfors (2022) on Ambiguity Aversion in Vignettes

Joshua P. White and Andrew Perfors, “Ambiguity Aversion in Qualitative Contexts: The Role of Prior Beliefs,” May 22, 2022; available here.

• The idea is to test for ambiguity aversion in more-or-less familiar risky situations that are not about money, such as blind dates or election outcomes. Further, the issue of whether ambiguity aversion arises from people holding pessimistic beliefs about the actual odds facing them in ambiguous situations is explored.

• The three lab experiments employ Amazon Mechanical Turk (overall n>2000) and the analysis is pre-registered, including the data exclusion criteria.

• The 24 vignettes: Would you rather be in the risky situation or the ambiguous situation? Half of the vignettes concern potential gains (e.g., new job) and half concern potential losses (e.g., losing a job). 

• The results: ambiguity aversion is typically present on average in both the gain and loss framings; ambiguity aversion is greater, however, in the gain scenarios, and the amount of aversion varies quite a bit across scenarios. 

• The scenario that tracked an Ellsberg urn problem showed (easily) the highest ambiguity aversion. 

• For some individuals, the aversion to ambiguity seems to derive from pessimistic feelings about how ambiguity would be resolved. (The Ellsberg-style urn vignette – which involved a casino! – is particularly likely to be affected by pessimism.) But there remains a good deal of ambiguity aversion that does not derive from pessimistic beliefs (nor from "comparative ignorance," the concern that a decision maker is up against better informed folks – such as casino owners, perhaps?).

Mueller et al. (2019) on Illusory Preferences

Maximilian W. Mueller, Joan Hamory Hicks, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Edward Miguel, “The Illusion of Stable Preferences Over Major Life Decisions.” NBER Working Paper 25844, May 2019; available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w25844.

• Uh, "major life decisions" such as the number of children to have. 

• High-stakes decisions tend to be ones that we have little experience with: they are not like choosing a breakfast cereal. Also, they have major implications down the road, so it is helpful to have a good feeling of what our future preferences will be like. But perhaps people suffer from projection bias, they overestimate the extent to which their future preferences will resemble their current preferences.

• The inquiry looks into the stability over time with respect to women's preferences over the desirable number of children to have. Do women hold accurate forecasts of their own future preferences with respect to children? Do women recall accurately their previous preferences?

• The data are drawn from young Kenyan women, followed over a nine-year span.

• Most respondents, over the course of the nine years, change their desired number of children – and 20% change it by two or more children.

• Almost half of the respondents who do not expect to have a child in the next five years do have a child in that time. Mothers and married women who report that they do not expect to have a child in the next five years do not meet their expectations most of the time.

• Most women cannot correctly recall their desired fertility from three years ago. Indeed, for those whose desired fertility changes, less than 10 percent recall their old preferences correctly. Married women and mothers who have increased their desired fertility are particularly unlikely to recall accurately their old preferences – rather, they think that their current preferences are the same as what they used to be. 

• Average fertility desires are pretty stable over time – but at the individual level, there is lots of movement. This movement is neither foreseen nor, after the fact, recognized: there is both projection bias and retrospection bias. 

Golman, Loewenstein, Moene, and Zarri (2016) on Belief Consonance

Russell Golman, George Loewenstein, Karl Ove Moene, and Luca Zarri, “The Preference for Belief Consonance.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30(3): 165-188, Summer 2016 [pdf].

• People like to have beliefs that accord with the beliefs of others. Sharing beliefs enhances our connection to our group. 

• Much of world conflict is about beliefs – often about rather subtle differences in beliefs. Recall that people protect beliefs in which they have invested heavily. 

• Conflict over small differences in beliefs might arise because our beliefs are most threatened by those who are otherwise similar to us. 

• People do not like to have their beliefs challenged, so media have incentives not to challenge beliefs.

• Beliefs might come first, and only then do we develop the “rational” reasons that we hold them; see Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon, 2012. 

• Belief consonance can be self-reinforcing: when someone stubbornly refuses to agree with me, I can attribute her stubbornness to her own interest in protecting her initial beliefs – and therefore I do not have to reconsider my own beliefs. 

• In the interest of possessing consonant beliefs, all people might believe X, but believe that everyone else believes “not X”: “pluralistic ignorance”. See Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Harvard, 1998. 

• In trust and dictator games, people are more generous when paired with members of their own political party.

• Two (complementary?) approaches to the enticements  of belief consonance: (1) desire to match beliefs with a group that you are in, or want to join; and (2) desire to maintain desirable beliefs about yourself. 

• On the whole, belief consonance probably is detrimental to society.

Bénabou and Tirole (2016) on Motivated Beliefs

Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole, “Mindful Economics: The Production, Consumption, and Value of Beliefs.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30(3): 141-164, Summer 2016.

• People value their beliefs, both directly and for instrumental reasons; therefore, beliefs can withstand counter-evidence, and people may prefer to steer clear of evidence.

• Positive beliefs can be nurtured by responding asymmetrically to good and bad news.

• Shared beliefs also can be resistant to evidence, possibly with dreadful consequences.

• Bénabou et Tirole treat beliefs as if they were standard economic goods or assets, which people consume, invest in, produce, and so on.

• Optimism can serve as a sort of commitment device to stick with long-term projects and to avoid temptation. False beliefs can also influence other people in a way that might serve your interests. Religious beliefs might contribute both to self-discipline and to improve your view of yourself and your future. 

• Methods to protect valued beliefs include “strategic ignorance, reality denial, and self-signaling [p. 144].” More educated people are not better shielded from employing these methods. 

• Confirmation bias allows people to believe that their previous views have been corroborated. They anticipate this future corroboration, and this allows them to take on risky projects. 

• Emotional responses to a challenge to your beliefs are a signal that your beliefs are something you are trying to protect. Standard rationality suggests that challenges should be welcomed -- shades of  J. S. Mill.

• There’s a trade-off between accepting bad news and optimizing decisions given reality versus living in blissful ignorance for awhile before the piper must be paid. 

• Because it is easier to recall our actions than it is to recall our motives, we might try to self-signal, by choosing actions that will allow us to later have a good (but distorted) view of ourselves. 

• In laboratory experiments, subjects have a harder time remembering (accurately) their past failures.

• Self-deception rises with the size of the sunk costs. People persuade themselves of the future value of these investments. 

• People are quite good at believing they had sound reasons for their bad behaviors. 

• Blind persistence in social projects in the face of bad news might make the situation more tolerable. But if persistence can lead to bigger losses, watch out for “Mutually Assured Delusion.” Unfortunately, it is in this situation that denial becomes contagious. 

• Organizational failures might be a result of bad beliefs as much as bad incentives. 

• “Just-world” beliefs and the extent of the welfare state are negatively correlated. 

• Constitutional guarantees of free speech and a free press might serve as a commitment device to allow dissent even in the future bad states – and reduce the protection of current beliefs, because of the increased likelihood that they will be challenged, anyway.