Meat, Beyond the Plate: Data-Driven Hypotheses for Understanding Consumer Willingness to Adopt a More Plant-Based Diet
Understanding why people eat meat – and if they may be willing to change their diets – is of great interest to many animal advocates. This study from the U.S. looks at the phenomenon of eating meat, and tries to explain how larger groups of consumers may change their habits after being exposed to “information about the impact of meat.” The study provides useful information to both scholars and advocates interested in behavior, psychology, and understanding how people construct their ethics around eating meat.
The consumption of meat seems to be as popular as ever, and even though there is “growing scientific consensus that plant-based diets are more sustainable and alleviate animal suffering,” the global trend in meat consumption continues to rise. There is a desire on the part of animal advocates to promote a shift away from the consumption of animal products, but researchers note that “evidence concerning the psychosocial processes which affect this shift remains sparse and insufficient relating to changes at the societal level.” In other words, there is little scientific data that can shed light on how we might promote a shift away from meat eating as a cultural norm, not just on an individual level.
To try to better understand this process, researchers set up an online survey which they believe was “the first to provide an in-depth enquiry of consumer representations of meat, perceived impacts of meat, and rationales used when called upon to consider changing consumption habits after exposure to information on the impact of meat. It explores how each of these relates with each other and with willingness to follow a more plant-based diet.” Through posing questions regarding the respondents’ motivations for eating meat, as well as delivering information to them regarding the impact of meat eating on the environment and animals, the researchers carefully triangulated how respondents felt about their consumption habits. Over 400 of these surveys were assembled together, with some interesting results. The researchers identified “three different clusters of consumers, referring to a pattern of attachment to meat (positive valence and higher affective intensity), a pattern of disgust (negative valence and higher affective intensity), and a pattern of avoidance (neutral to negative valence and lower affective intensity).” For the cluster of people with attachment to meat “the results raise the hypothesis that mere exposure to information on the impacts of current patterns of production and consumption may not to be sufficient to elicit willingness to change. Instead, it is possible that some initiatives to encourage reducing meat-eating may actually increase entrenchment in meat-eating justifications.” The researchers also found that “the clusters of participants mostly associated with willingness to avoid/reduce meat consumption and follow a plant-based diet consisted almost solely of women, while the cluster associated with unwillingness to change was more balanced in terms of participants’ gender.”
The researchers caution that, despite their thorough efforts, “given the exploratory nature of this work, it is important to highlight that all propositions are tentative.” They note that “much more research” is needed to understand the psychosocial processes that are at play in how we perceive meat eating, both on an individual and cultural level. For advocates of these issues, whatever may “hinder or engage a cultural shift” is of the utmost importance, and though these findings are tentative, they offer important insight into how people conceptualize their relationship with the consumption of animal products.
Original Abstract:
A shift towards reduced meat consumption and a more plant-based diet is endorsed to promote sustainability, improve public health, and minimize animal suffering. However, large segments of consumers do not seem willing to make such transition. While it may take a profound societal change to achieve significant progresses on this regard, there have been limited attempts to understand the psychosocial processes that may hinder or facilitate this shift. This study provides an in-depth exploration of how consumer representations of meat, the impact of meat, and rationales for changing or not habits relate with willingness to adopt a more plant-based diet. Multiple Correspondence Analysis was em- ployed to examine participant responses (N = 410) to a set of open-ended questions, free word association tasks and closed questions. Three clusters with two hallmarks each were identified: (1) a pattern of disgust towards meat coupled with moral internalization; (2) a pattern of low affective connection towards meat and willingness to change habits; and (3) a pattern of attachment to meat and unwillingness to change habits. The findings raise two main propositions. The first is that an affective connection towards meat relates to the perception of the impacts of meat and to willingness to change consumption habits. The second proposition is that a set of rationales resembling moral disengagement mechanisms (e.g., pro- meat justifications; self-exonerations) arise when some consumers contemplate the consequences of meat production and consumption, and the possibility of changing habits.