As is the case with farmed animals, where seeing them as food directly leads to a reduction of their perceived capacity to suffer, categorizing laboratory animals as 'mindless test-tubes' is an effective way justify the need to use them for scientific purposes. This 'dementalization' process is a disengagement and motivated strategy that helps to cope with the responsibility one holds in an inhumane and harmful behavior that could directly challenge consumer choice.
KEVIN VEZIRIAN: Consumers usually report that they care about the ethical attributes for the products they purchase, but these concerns do not always translate into actual ethical purchasing behaviors, and similarly, while people report being opposed to animal-testing, most consumers do not stop to contemplate whether the products they use are tested on animals. This gap between attitudes and behavior may arise due to the fact that many consumers choose to remain ‘willfully ignorant’ of ethical issues related to the products they are purchasing. Information avoidance is a common phenomenon, particularly when people are aware that some information (i.e., whether products are tested on animals) could directly challenge their consumer choice, and avoiding such information in essence helps people to “avoid potentially unearthing unethical behavior”.
In the context of animal-testing, it is likely that people may want to avoid information implicating animal harm, because causing such harm is commonly viewed as immoral, which echoes the fact that meat-eaters are motivated to avoid information about sentience on food-animals. We argue that individuals are intrinsically motivated to minimize animal welfare concerns resulting from animal experimentation. This inclination may stem from their desire to uphold the extensive utilization of animal models, which they perceive as an essential and necessary scientific practice for safety and health reasons, and instead will find ways to reframe the ethical implications of this practice. One avenue through which this can be achieved is through downplaying the harm animal testing brings, thereby directly reducing the conflict between their use of animal tested products and their concern for the welfare of laboratory animals.
One strategy for downplaying harm is to downplay the mental lives of people or animals that are subject to harm. Possessing mental capacities is what makes something capable of experiencing harm, and therefore of relevance to ethical decision-making, and inflicting harm or being accountable for harming living beings is deeply unsettling as it directly undermines moral foundations and is therefore likely to represent a moral threat. Minimizing the extent to which that harm matters – that is, the extent to which someone or something would have been negatively impacted – presents one avenue through which people can overcome the negative outcomes of their behavior. For instance, dehumanization (e.g., ‘denial of full humanness to others’) can be seen as a form of moral exclusion, allowing individuals to not consider some people as morally relevant, consequently making it appropriate or more acceptable to harm or exploit them. This dementalization process is a disengagement and motivated strategy that helps to cope with the responsibility one holds in an inhumane and harmful behavior, and interestingly, both the harm experienced by animals and the perceived responsibility into their harm, have been identified as triggers of the moral disengagement process toward them.
As objectification (e.g., ‘seeing a person as object-like, valued primarily for what they can do rather than who they are’), also leads to dementalization, thinking about the utility or function of animals might lead to the same outcome. Most relevant to the current research is work on the ‘meat-paradox’, which relies on a specific form of cognitive dissonance stressing the importance of the personal and behavioral commitment in dissonance arousal. Literature on the meat-paradox demonstrates that when people experience psychological conflict between their meat-eating practices and the harm experienced by animals in the meat production process, it increases their moral discomfort and guilt, and people try to reduce their responsibility by reducing their intentions to eat meat, but people also engage in dementalization mechanisms to reduce the negative emotions raised by their consumptions.
When people face objectified-animals (i.e., meat-animals) and the moral implications of eating them, then denying the qualities that make those animals morally relevant, namely their capacity to think and feel, is an efficient way to minimize and rationalize the harm animals experience during the meat-production process. Specifically, meat-eaters are more likely to downplay the mental lives of animals relative to vegetarians, especially when they are reminded of their own meat-eating behavior. Crucially, it has been shown that the mere-categorization of animals as food directly leads to the a reduction of their perceived capacity to suffer and the moral concerns toward them, thus reducing the conflict between caring for animals and eating meat.
When it comes to animal testing, individuals’ behavioral commitment is less salient and less routinized than in meat consumption, and this practice is even justified as being more necessary than meat consumption is because the health of oneself and others indirectly depends on it. Therefore, while it might be harder to disengage from animal testing than from meat eating, disengaging from the lab-animals can be very accessible. Many of the products tested on animals are considered important for human health. Most obvious are the many pharmaceuticals used to treat ill-health, but people are also often attached to other less essential products such as skincare or household goods.
Categorizing laboratory animals as mindless test-tubes is an effective way to protect current consumption patterns and justify the need to use them for scientific purpose, while overcoming the issues associated with knowledge that animal testing adversely impacts on laboratory animals’ welfare. Furthermore, since suffering experienced by animals and people’s perceived responsibility for their harm are triggers of moral disengagement, when making salient, they may maximize the dementalization of laboratory-animals.
In the current research, we examined whether raising consumer awareness regarding the use of animals in laboratories for product development and testing, and making salient people’s responsibility as consumers, shaped the way they perceive lab-animals… We experimentally examined across four preregistered and high-powered online studies (total N = 3405) whether categorizing animals as being lab-subjects, in a context where people are also reminded of the implications of their own consumer choices, could lead to their mind denial.
Findings confirmed that participants consistently denied mind to animals used for product testing compared to those same animals presented outside of this context. Manipulating the perceived suffering experienced by laboratory animals and the responsibility of individuals, however, did not affect the extent of mind denial. Our findings suggest, consistent with previous work, that categorizing animals as ‘furry test-tubes’ changes how we perceive them, in order to rationalize their use for testing the products we consume on a daily basis. SOURCE…
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