Research suggests that animals’ capacity for agency, experience, and benevolence predict beliefs about their moral treatment. Four studies built on this work by examining how fine‐grained information about animals’ traits and behaviours (e.g., can store food for later vs. can use tools) shifted moral beliefs about eating and harming animals. The information that most strongly affected moral beliefs was related to secondary emotions (e.g., can feel love), morality (e.g., will share food with others), empathy (e.g., can feel others' pain), social connections (e.g., will look for deceased family members), and moral patiency (e.g., can feel pain). In addition, information affected moral judgements in line with how it affected superordinate representations about animals’ capacity for experience/feeling but not agency/thinking. The results provide a fine‐grained outline of how, and why, information about animals’ traits and behaviours informs moral judgements.

The methods, data, and analysis script are available via the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/nzsr3/).

We iteratively develop and test a model to clarify the relationship between both high and low levels of social (influence) and personal (autonomy) power. A meta‐analysis synthesizing primary data (n = 298) and secondary data (n = 498) found that impaired personal power coincided with impaired social power, but not vice versa. Unexpectedly, elevated social power did not coincide with elevated personal power, suggesting that the association between influence and autonomy attenuates with increasing levels of power. Predictions arising from the meta‐analysis and our revised theoretical model were supported in a subsequent study (n = 266). We discuss implications of these findings and avenues for future research.

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The raw data, research materials, and analysis scripts are available via the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/jc8xq/).