The research suggests that appeals to care-taking emotions, which are so important for how we treat members of our own species, might be beneficial for getting people to rethink their relationship to meat. This seems especially true for women.
JARED PIAZZA: ‘Research shows that both men and women can detect cute features in baby faces. But women, especially women high in maternal tendencies, find images of cute babies particularly emotionally rewarding. Because of their mixed opinions about meat, and women’s emotional attunement to baby features, my colleagues Neil McLatchie, Cecilie Olesen and I wondered whether women might find meat particularly distasteful when it comes from a baby animal. Might women show greater tenderness towards a piglet than their adult counterpart, an adult pig? And might this lead women to reject meat, even when the end product looks the same for both animals?…
Across three studies, we presented 781 American men and women with either images of baby animals – from baby cows and kangaroos to baby pigs and lambs – or their adult counterparts… Women consistently found the meat dish less appetizing when it came from a baby animal than when from an adult… This was partly explained by their greater feelings of tenderness towards the baby animal. Results for men were less conclusive. Their appetite for the dish was largely unaffected by the “babyness” of the animal (across the studies, on average, about four points less appetizing when it was a baby).
Interestingly, we observed these gender differences despite establishing beforehand that both men and women rated baby farm animals (chicks, piglets, calves, lambs) as highly worthy of their moral concern… What our research suggest is that appeals to care-taking emotions, which are so important for how we treat members of our own species, might be beneficial for getting people to rethink their relationship to meat. This seems especially true for women’. SOURCE…
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