Attitudes towards Animals and Meat Consumption: The Role of Ideology and Individual Differences

Humans' relationships with non-human animals are complicated and complex. This thesis aims to address questions on how people think about animals' moral standing, how information about food animals' sentience is (mis)remembered, and how people evaluate laboratory-grown meat relative to traditional meat. The first empirical chapter of the thesis, Chapter 3, explores the question of whether higher human supremacy beliefs are associated with a greater perceived moral divide between animals of high and low status. Across two studies (N = 196 and N = 256), the findings suggest that people holding stronger human supremacy beliefs also perceive a greater moral divide between animals, which may serve as a legitimising strategy to preserve not only the existing human-animal hierarchy, but also greater hierarchical divides between other animals. The second set of studies, presented in Chapter 4 (N = 253 and N = 255), focuses on food animals specifically, investigating the ideologically motivated memory processes involved in the processing of objective information about these animals' sentience. Indeed, dominance-based ideologies were significant predictors for targeted memory errors for information on food animals' sentience, but not for information on their uses (e.g., in medical science), suggesting that differences in ideological attitudes interfere with the correct recall of sentience information for food animals. The final set of studies, presented in Chapter 5 (total N = 1,169), turns its focus to the psychological barriers to acceptance of laboratory-grown meat, which is structurally identical to traditionally farmed meat and presents solutions to the ethical, environmental, and public health issues associated with traditional animal agriculture. The three experiments consistently demonstrated that omnivores who were wearier about new food technologies evaluated clean meat more negatively than traditional meat. Experiment 3 further demonstrated that safety concerns, but not naturalness concerns, partly explained why those wearier of novel food technologies evaluated clean meat less positively. Taken together, the findings highlight the role of general concerns about the use of new food technology as a psychological barrier to clean meat acceptance. This thesis thus adds to the growing body of literature on human-animal intergroup relations, providing further evidence for the ways in which individual differences and ideology affect peoples' thinking about animals of different socio-cultural status, as well as attitudes towards meat substitutes.