The decision about whether to eat meat has a moral dimension
to it. The animals that we use for food
are complex creatures. Deciding to eat
them means accepting that they will be killed so that you can eat them.
That is not to say, of course, that people grapple with this
decision at every meal, but in some way everyone has to make some decision
about whether to eat animals. And before
I go any further with this discussion, I should mention that I have been a vegetarian
for about 10 years now for a combination of economic, health, and moral
reasons.
An interesting question about eating meat involves how
people grapple with the issue that many animals people eat are reasonably
intelligent creatures. An interesting
paper in the February, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
by Brock Bastian, Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam, and Helena Radke suggests that
when people eat meat, they tend to downplay the minds of the animals that they
eat.
In one simple study, the researchers asked (meat-eating) participants
to rate how willing they were to eat a variety of animals ranging from
houseflies, to fish, to chicken to elephants to gorillas. They also rated the how strongly each of
these animals had a number of mental abilities such as feeling hunger, fear,
and pain, and having self-control and planning abilities. There was a systematic relationship between
the animals people choose to eat and their beliefs about the minds of the
animals. People were much less willing
to eat animals that they believe have complex mental abilities than to eat
animals that do not have complex minds.
Of course, this alone might just mean that the animals that
people choose to eat are the ones that are not so smart. In another study, meat eaters were asked to
think about cows and sheep. Some of them
thought about these animals living an idyllic life on a farm. Others thought specifically about these
animals growing up on a farm and then being killed for food. Later, they also rated the mental abilities
of the animals. When people thought
about the animals as food, their ratings of the mental abilities of the animals
were lower than when they thought about the animals living on a farm.
It isn’t just thinking about animals being used for food,
though. In one final study, all of the
participants had to write about the process of raising and butchering animals
for food. All of the participants
thought they were going to do a food sampling task after writing the essay. Half of the participants were told they would
be eating fruit during the food sampling, while others were told they would be
eating beef and lamb. Finally,
participants rated the mental abilities of cows and sheep. The group that was about to eat meat gave
much lower ratings of the mental abilities of cows and sheep than the group
that was about to eat fruit.
These studies suggest that people who choose to eat meat
have to grapple with the moral dilemma of eating an animal with a brain whether
they realize it or not. Because of the
importance of eating to our lives, we think about food animals as less complex
than other animals. This effect is
particularly strong in the context of meat eating.
Of course, this mechanism is not special to eating. There are lots of situations in life that cause different goals and moral values
to come into conflict. Eating a piece of
chocolate may conflict with a diet.
Buying a new car may conflict with the desire to save for a new
home. Research that I did with Miguel
Brendl demonstrates that, when one goal becomes highly engaged, we change our
attitudes about things that would conflict with that goal to make them less
attractive.
So, generally speaking, we have mechanisms that help us to satisfy our goals, in part by discounting the attitudes we hold that might get in the way of those goals.
