Harnessing Moral Psychology to Reduce Meat Consumption

Abstract

How can we make moral progress on factory farming? Part of the answer lies in human moral psychology. Meat consumption remains high, despite increased awareness of its negative impact on animal welfare. Weakness of will is part of the explanation: acceptance of the ethical arguments doesn’t always motivate changes in dietary habits. However, we draw on scientific evidence to argue that many consumers aren’t fully convinced that they morally ought to reduce their meat consumption. We then identify two key psychological mechanisms—motivated reasoning and social proof—that lead people to resist the ethical reasons. Finally, we show how to harness these psychological mechanisms to encourage reductions in meat consumption. A central lesson for moral progress generally is that durable social change requires socially-embedded reasoning.

Situated Affectivity and Mind Shaping: Lessons from Social Psychology

“…14 Mind shaping of this kind has already proven to be effective, for instance, in connection with healthy eating habits (Vecchio & Cavallo, 2019), where the positioning of healthy food options on menus (Keegan et al, 2019) or healthy food recipes on food platforms (Starke et al, 2021) affects people’s dietary choices. It can also encourage more sustainable consumption habits (e.g., Demarque et al, 2015; Lehner et al, 2016) by increasing people’s willingness to use reusable takeaway boxes (Dorn & Stoeckli, 2018) or cups (Loschelder et al, 2019) or reducing meat consumption (May & Kumar, 2022; Sparkman et al, 2020) and ideological biases on climate change (Goldberg et al, 2020; Sparkman et al, 2021).…”