LUCIUS CAVIOLA: ‘Our relationship with animals is complex. There are some animals we treat very kindly; we keep them as pets, give them names, and take them to the doctor when they are sick. Other animals, in contrast, seem not to deserve this privileged status; we use them as objects for human consumption, trade, involuntary experimental subjects, industrial equipment, or as sources of entertainment… Philosophers have referred to this phenomenon of discriminating individuals on the basis of their species membership as speciesism… Whether speciesism actually exists… isn’t just a philosophical question, however. Fundamentally, these are hypotheses about human psychology that can be explored and tested empirically. Yet surprisingly, speciesism has been almost entirely neglected by psychologists…
Together with my colleagues Jim A.C. Everett and Nadira S. Faber, I recently published a paper on speciesism in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Caviola, Everett, & Faber, 2018). Our aim was to establish speciesism as a topic in the field… Our research showed that the philosophers were right when they drew an analogy between speciesism and other forms of prejudice… Speciesism also manifests in real world behavior. In our studies, speciesism predicted whether people are more willing to help humans than animals, or “superior” animals to “inferior” animals… Finally, speciesism is related to ethical vegetarianism. Even though our studies showed that not everybody who rejects speciesism believes that eating meat is wrong, we still observed that people higher on speciesism tended to prefer a meat snack over a vegetarian snack’. SOURCE…
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