Meat and interpersonal motives: the case of self-enhancement

ABSTRACT

Meat eaters have a more hierarchical, less egalitarian view at the world than vegetarians. This can be manifested in social dominance orientation, at the intergroup level, but also at the interspecies level, yielding more empathy with nonhuman animals, and at the interpersonal level. We examined if interpersonal motives in human–human relationships and empathy with people are associated with frequency of meat eating, using a cross-sectional survey (N = 580). For the motives power and affiliation, no significant relationships emerged, but the self-enhancement motive was positively related to the number of days that participants ate meat. This predicted additional variance over and above variables at the intergroup and interspecies level, such as social dominance orientation and human-animal continuity. Empathy with people was negatively related to meat consumption, but this was explained by its correlation with empathy with animals. Discussion focuses on the importance of the self-enhancement motive in attachment to meat, the symbol of human superiority, as well as resistance to meat refusers.

KEYWORDS:

• Meat consumption
• interpersonal motives
• self-enhancement
• empathy
• social dominance orientation
• speciesism

Acknowledgments

This study was possible thanks to the work of Judith Dunsbergen, Merlin Reimann, Sara Ordanovski, Ilse van Santfoort, and Stephanie Timmermans, as part of their Bachelor’s program, and expert help from William van der Veld with the regression and path analyses. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical statement

This manuscript was not submitted anywhere else. The research was conducted with human participants who participated voluntarily after informed consent. All ethical guidelines in the treatment of participants and in conducting and analysing the studies were followed.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2132369

Data availability statement

All raw data are freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality.

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/juyqv

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/juyqv

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The study was conducted in 2015, shortly before we learned about the revised SDO-7 (Ho et al., 2015).

2. In a follow-up study (unpublished data not reported here because it does not contain the interpersonal motives assessment) we found that this self-report measure had good relations with behavior on a task where participants selected toppings for a pizza they felt like eating tonight. For instance, the self-reported number of days eating meat correlated r = .47 with the number of meat toppings chosen.

3. In a later study, in which we took care to create a larger number of perspective-taking and personal distress items about animals, we did obtain the same three-dimensional pattern as in the empathy with people scale, though less pronounced.

4. The 5 items addressing the comparison between empathy with animals and with people (e.g., “I sometimes empathize more with animals than with people”) were used in a separate scale, λ₂ = .88. It correlated strongly with Empathy with Animals, r = .85, and therefore was not included in the present analyses, to avoid redundancy.

5. We also examined a variable obtained by subtracting the number of vegetarian or vegan days from the number of meat days; the results were highly similar.

6. Cognitive Empathy with People and Power motive are not included in these results. The correlations (Table 2) already indicated they are relatively unimportant, and they did not explain significant additional variance in the regression.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Roos Vonk

Roos Vonk is full professor in social psychology at Radboud University. She got her PhD at Leiden University studying person perception. Since then, she is studying self-esteem/self-enhancement, human-animal relations/empathy with animals, and moral resistance to persuasion.

Maike L. V. Weiper

Maike L. V. Weiper is a research master’s student in behavioural sciences at Radboud University. Her work focuses on the psychology of social change, e.g. how activists and activist movements are perceived by the public.