Beauty of the Beast: Beauty as an important dimension in the moral standing of animals

Klebl, Christoph; Luo, Yin; Tan, Nicholas Poh-Jie; Ern, Judah Teo Ping; Bastian, Brock

doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101624

Cited by 20 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Procedure and materials. As part of an unrelated study (see Klebl, Tan, et al, 2021), perceived beauty of all images in the Animal Images Database (Possidónio et al, 2019) was assessed on an 11-point scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 1 (very much so; N M = 45.1). The beauty scale comprised the following items: beautiful, attractive, good-looking, appealing, ugly (reverse scored), pleasing, pretty, exquisite, and hideous (reverse scored).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity

Klebl

Luo

Bastian

2021

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

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Researchers have tended to focus on mind perception as integral to judgments of moral standing, yet a smaller body of evidence suggests that beauty may also be an important factor (for some people and animals). Across six studies ( N = 1,662), we investigated whether beauty increases moral standing attributions to a wide range of targets, including non-sentient entities, and explored the psychological mechanism through which beauty assigns moral standing to targets. We found that people attribute greater moral standing to beautiful (vs. ugly) animals (Study 1 and Study 5a, preregistered) and humans (Study 2). This effect also extended to non-sentient targets, that is, people perceive beautiful (vs. ugly) landscapes (Study 3) and buildings (Study 4 and Study 5b, preregistered) as possessing greater moral standing. Across all studies, perceptions of purity mediated the effect of beauty on moral standing, suggesting that beauty increases the moral standing individuals place on targets through evoking moral intuitions of purity.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 7 We inadvertently did not include a manipulation check in this study. However, differences in perceived beauty between the sets of images was validated in a separate study (see Klebl, Tan, et al, 2021). …”

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confidence: 99%

Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity

Klebl

Luo

Bastian

2021

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

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“…While there is considerable variation in the size of people's moral circle there are also consistent patterns in who we ascribe moral worth to: Typically, we ascribe most moral standing to our family and friends, followed by human in-groups and outgroups, high and low sentient animals, then plants and, finally, villains (e.g., murderers), who are granted the lowest moral standing ; see also Neldner et al, 2018). Thus, different targets are afforded different levels of moral standing and researchers have started to examine which target characteristics predict whether people include them in their moral circle, including sentience (K. Gray et al, 2012;Leach et al, 2020), intelligence (Wilks et al, 2021), species category (Caviola et al, 2019), similarity to humans (Miralles et al, 2019), beauty (Klebl et al, 2021), and moral badness (Piazza et al, 2014).…”

Section: Target and Judge Contributions To Judgments Of Moral Concernmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relative importance of target and judge characteristics in shaping our moral circle

Jaeger¹,

Wilks²

2021

Preprint

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People’s treatment of others—humans, animals, or other targets—often depends on whether they think the entity is worthy of moral consideration. Recent work has begun to examine which factors determine whether an entity is included in people’s moral circle. Here, we rely on multilevel modeling to map the variance components of the moral circle. We examine how much variance in moral concern is explained by who is being judged (i.e., between-target differences), by who is making the judgment (i.e., between-judge differences), and by their interaction. Two studies with participants from the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia (N = 836) show that all three components explain substantial amounts of variance in judgments of moral concern. Few cross-country differences emerged. Thus, to accurately predict when people grant moral standing to a target, characteristics of the target, characteristics of the judge, and their interaction need to be considered.

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“…As a result, various emerging legal instruments around the world have been granting rights to animals. However, the inclusion of animals within moral circles is subjected to important biases, with a preference for charismatic, familiar, and beautiful vertebrates (Klebl et al, 2021). We argue that legal instruments embracing such biases may jeopardize biodiversity conservation.…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

Emerging laws must not protect stray cats and their impacts

Carrete

Clavero

Arrondo

et al. 2022

Conservat Sci and Prac

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Beauty of the Beast: Beauty as an important dimension in the moral standing of animals

Cited by 20 publications

References 42 publications

Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity

Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity

The relative importance of target and judge characteristics in shaping our moral circle

Emerging laws must not protect stray cats and their impacts

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