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Moralization And Becoming A Vegetarian

Summary By: | Published: August 16, 2012
Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute
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EXTERNAL STUDY This is a summary of an external study
Compares vegetarians motivated by health to those motivated by morals, including an examination of the transformation of vegetarianism from food preference into moral decision.

Describes the moralization process, where an object or activity attains a moral component by converting preferences into values, increasing the likelihood of internalization, eliciting greater emotional response and therefore receives the support of other institutions.

Reasons for avoiding meat include:

  • Healthiness of non-meat diets (43.7% strongly agree)
  • Ecological wastefulness of meat (38.2%)
  • Killing of animals (35%)
  • Suffering of animals (35%)

These reasons are also the most common initial reasons for avoiding meat.

The subjects who began as moral vegetarians had more of a reason for being a current vegetarian than those who did not. Moral origin vegetarians reject a wider range of animal products than others.

Disgust includes a mental state, contamination potency of the source of disgust, and a feeling of nausea. Calculating a measurement of disgust based on these three components, moral origin vegetarians exhibit higher disgust scores than health origin vegetarians.

The dislike for the sensory properties of meat was not higher in moral vegetarians than in health vegetarians.

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Citations:

Paul Rozin, Maureen Markwith, Caryn Stoess, University of Pennsylvania, 1987

Tags:

Animals Used for Food English Human Health Psychology Veg*n Diets Humans

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