The Meat Paradox: non-vegans “care too much” about animals to listen to activists, say researchers
ANALYSIS: According to researchers, attempting to convince people not to eat meat too judgmentally could be counterproductive because they actually ‘care too much’ about animals, forcing them to use various methods to escape the uncomfortable truth. Can knowing this make us better activists?
From embattled vegans enduring hostile family dinners to impassioned animal justice campaigners manning outreach stalls on the frontlines of town and city high streets, anyone that has ever tried to convince a non-vegan to do the right thing has at some time encountered the curious phenomenon that is cognitive dissonance, or more specifically, the meat paradox as it’s known to psychologists.
At the crux of the paradox is a conflict: we like to eat meat, but we know it’s wrong. Even knowing how bad raising and eating animals is for our health, the planet and of course ethically, less than 5 per cent of people change their diets accordingly. This means that the vast majority of us face this conundrum in the wrong way by resorting to mental gymnastics and unashamed denial.
In the wake of COP26 and a global pandemic linked to animal exploitation, and with a growing recognition of the sentience of non-human animals, a recent review paper by researchers from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge examined the meat paradox as a barrier to efforts to create strategies to reduce meat consumption for health, the environment and animal welfare.
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Sarah Gradidge, a doctoral candidate at ARU in Cambridge, UK, was among the authors of the ARU study, itself a review of more than 70 previous papers that had all attempted to make sense of the meat paradox.
The review looked for the paradox’s “triggers” - the events that first bring to a meat eater’s attention the conflict of ethics and actions - and, possibly more importantly for us as animal justice advocates, the “strategies” that non-vegans use to convince themselves they’re not terrible people for paying for animals to die.
“The most common triggers were, for example, reminding people of the animal origins of their meat,” Gradidge told Technology Networks. “That can just be very triggering, because people tend to, for example, when they eat meat, forget about the animal’s existence, to forget that the meat comes from the animals. As soon as you remind people that meat comes from animals, this can really trigger that discomfort, because it basically stops their ability to dissociate. It reminds them of where it is coming from.”
Animal activists reading this may say that what humans find uncomfortable and even triggering is relatively trivial compared to the suffering animals endure and on an unimaginable scale, but understanding human psychology is vitally important for informing our outreach efforts. Taking into account a person’s sensitivities may seem like going easy on them when animals aren’t given any such courtesy, but thanks to academic efforts to understand human thinking in these discussions, we can start to streamline our outreach tactics.
For example, according to Gradridge’s paper, people experiencing uncomfortable discussions about their meat-eating habits and caught in the grip of the paradox are forced down one of three possible pathways - two of which as advocates we want to avoid:
Changing their moral values to a position of not caring about animals at all;
Changing their actions by eating less or no meat;
Or using a mental trick called disengagement to minimise feelings of discomfort.
From an outreach perspective, the first two pathways represent the two opposite extremes of possible outcomes of a discussion, particularly if we go at it a bit stronger with our vegan rhetoric. For those of us who prefer a softer approach, the third pathway - disengagement - may be more familiar and arguably more common. It’s rare that someone would change their moral code entirely or immediately switch to vegan (and stay that way) from one discussion with a vegan - more likely they’ll attempt to disengage and then think upon it later.
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Gradridge went further, explaining that disengagement itself falls into two important categories: direct, in which people actively try to justify their meat consumption; and indirect, where they simply shut out thoughts of animals suffering or use euphemisms like ‘livestock’ to create a linguistic disconnect between what we see on supermarket shelves and the cute lambs and piglets we see on social media.
“We basically find that men tend to be more resistant to reducing their meat consumption than women, and they tend to use different strategies,” Gradbridge added. “Men tend to be using more direct strategies, whereas women tend to be using more indirect strategies.”
Direct strategies identified in the ARU paper include:
Denying that animals can feel pain;
Denying that animals have intelligence, sentience or consciousness;
The ‘four Ns’ of categorising meat-eating as normal, natural, necessary or nice.
This kind of insight can help prepare vegan advocates before engaging in discussions. We run the risk of generalising based on assumptions of gender when we frequently encounter exceptions, but if anything this impresses the importance of being practised firstly in recognising direct and indirect disengagement, and secondly being able to very quickly change and adapt our approach to suit the individual.
For example, if someone starts to argue that animals aren’t intelligent enough to experience suffering, that is a clear sign of direct disengagement for which the response would be to talk about recent advances in scientific understanding and even examples of governments recognising animal sentience, such as with the UK’s new Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill.
On the subject of strategies to discourage meat consumption, Gradridge said that more research was needed to find an approach. Without this, it’s hard to create a framework for outreach discussions, but Gradridge suggested we avoid judgmental language because meat-eaters may actually care too much about animal welfare.
“We need to understand that people perhaps aren't responding in negative ways because they don't care," said Gradidge. "Actually, people may be responding in negative ways because they care too much; this is what's making them feel uncomfortable.”
“It's about trying to find a way to talk about these issues that encourages behaviour change in a positive way and doesn't make people respond in a negative way. We absolutely need to talk about these issues. But we need to do it in a way that is non-blaming.”
Gradridge warned that taking the wrong approach could result in people sticking their heads in the sand completely, or even vowing to eat more animals as a protest against activists’ efforts. We would argue, however, that recognition of meat paradox coping mechanisms and the importance of gaining experience in adapting accordingly are the key lessons from this review study.
When you’re face-to-face and engaged with a non-vegan, be they a family member, colleague or stranger on the streets, knowing what you’re dealing with and how to get through to them is always easier said than done. But if we’re to take anything away from this, it’s that we’re not alone in our confusion surrounding the meat paradox and cognitive dissonance - psychologists and other academics are working hard to understand it for animals, health and the planet.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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