CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH: The hidden biases that drive anti-Vegan hatred
To continue to eat meat requires some serious mental gymnastics. By their mere existence, Vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance, and this makes people angry.
ZARIA GORVETT: ‘As the popularity of vegan life continues to gather pace, a tide of vitriol has risen. To eat meat, or not to eat meat: the question has become a battleground, with passionate carnivores and vegan activists deploying some deliciously headline-grabbing tactics. There have been pig robberies. There have been defiant public carvings of deer legs. There have been nude protesters smothered with fake blood. There have been provocative sandwiches.
Though it’s natural for people to disagree, the passionate rage – and even mild irritation – that veganism stirs up seems to defy rational sense. Research has shown that only drug addicts face the same degree of stigma – and the least popular vegans of all are those who cite animal cruelty as their reason. Given that most of us would probably like to see less suffering in the world, why is there such resentment towards those who do something about it?…
Veganophobes have plenty of reasonable (and not-so-reasonable) sounding explanations at the ready. First up there’s the hypocrisy argument – the idea that vegans have blood on their hands, too – in the form of plant massacres… Other popular arguments include the perception of vegans as over-smug… and over-zealous… But are these really the reasons that people hate vegans? Not everyone is convinced.
Some psychologists take another view – that far from being driven by factors within our conscious awareness, the widespread resentment we have for vegans is down to deep-seated psychological biases. Hank Rothgerber, a social psychologist at Bellarmine University, Kentucky, thinks it all comes down to answering the question: how do we continue to eat meat?
“So basically we live in an era today, at least in the Western world, where there’s more and more evidence, more and more arguments, and more and more books about how eating meat is bad,” says Rothgerber. “But still, our behaviour hasn’t changed significantly”… “So what I’m looking at is, how do people rationalise that, and still feel like they’re a good person?” To continue to eat meat, Rothgerber suggests, requires some serious mental gymnastics.
Luckily, our brains are extremely good at protecting us from realities we don’t want to face – and there are a number of psychological tricks at our disposal… Some psychologists call this the “meat paradox”, though it’s also been couched in stronger terms – as “moral schizophrenia” or “cognitive dissonance”, which occurs when a person holds two incompatible views, and acts on one of them. In this case, your affection for animals might just start to clash with the idea that it’s OK to eat them…
In the case of eating meat, Rothgerber suggests we have a number of strategies – around 15 – which allow us to avoid facing up to the meat paradox. These include pretending that meat has no link to animals… Unfortunately, most of these are derailed by the presence of vegans… when a vegan turns up at a dinner party, suddenly we’re bumped out of the comfortable “mainstream diet” category and into the unsettling “meat-eating” category. By their mere existence, vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance. And this makes people angry…
Decades of psychological research have shown that, when making a decision, people tend to allow themselves to reach their preferred conclusion, as long as they can invent a rational-sounding justification… In the case of meat, this “motivated reasoning” might lead people to find explanations for why eating animals is the correct decision. And one of these is that vegans are bad.
In a study led by Julia Minson, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, participants were surveyed about their attitudes towards vegans and then asked to think of three words that they associated with them. Just under half the participants had something negative to say, and intriguingly, 45% included a word which referred to their social characteristics. For example, vegans were allied with the words “weird”, “arrogant”, “preachy”, “militant”, “uptight”, “stupid”, and – mysteriously – “sadistic”. SOURCE…
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