{"id":759789,"date":"2020-03-02T08:44:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T13:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=759789"},"modified":"2020-03-02T08:44:12","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T13:44:12","slug":"cant-handle-the-truth-the-hidden-biases-that-drive-anti-vegan-hatred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=759789","title":{"rendered":"CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH: The hidden biases that drive anti-Vegan hatred"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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To continue to eat meat requires some serious mental gymnastics. By their mere existence, Vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance, and this makes people angry.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

ZARIA GORVETT:<\/strong> ‘As the popularity of vegan life continues to gather pace, a tide of vitriol has risen. To eat meat, or not to eat meat: the question has become a battleground, with passionate carnivores and vegan activists deploying some deliciously headline-grabbing tactics. There have been pig robberies. There have been defiant public carvings of deer legs. There have been nude protesters smothered with fake blood. There have been provocative sandwiches.<\/em><\/p>\n

Though it\u2019s natural for people to disagree, the passionate rage \u2013 and even mild irritation \u2013 that veganism stirs up seems to defy rational sense. Research has shown that only drug addicts face the same degree of stigma \u2013 and the least popular vegans of all are those who cite animal cruelty as their reason. Given that most of us would probably like to see less suffering in the world, why is there such resentment towards those who do something about it?…<\/em><\/p>\n

Veganophobes have plenty of reasonable (and not-so-reasonable) sounding explanations at the ready. First up there\u2019s the hypocrisy argument \u2013 the idea that vegans have blood on their hands, too \u2013 in the form of plant massacres… Other popular arguments include the perception of vegans as over-smug… and over-zealous… But are these really the reasons that people hate vegans? Not everyone is convinced.<\/em><\/p>\n

Some psychologists take another view \u2013 that far from being driven by factors within our conscious awareness, the widespread resentment we have for vegans is down to deep-seated psychological biases. Hank Rothgerber, a social psychologist at Bellarmine University, Kentucky, thinks it all comes down to answering the question: how do we continue to eat meat?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cSo basically we live in an era today, at least in the Western world, where there\u2019s more and more evidence, more and more arguments, and more and more books about how eating meat is bad,\u201d says Rothgerber. \u201cBut still, our behaviour hasn’t changed significantly”… \u201cSo what I\u2019m looking at is, how do people rationalise that, and still feel like they\u2019re a good person?\u201d To continue to eat meat, Rothgerber suggests, requires some serious mental gymnastics.<\/em><\/p>\n

Luckily, our brains are extremely good at protecting us from realities we don\u2019t want to face \u2013 and there are a number of psychological tricks at our disposal… Some psychologists call this the \u201cmeat paradox\u201d, though it\u2019s also been couched in stronger terms \u2013 as \u201cmoral schizophrenia\u201d or \u201ccognitive dissonance\u201d, which occurs when a person holds two incompatible views, and acts on one of them. In this case, your affection for animals might just start to clash with the idea that it\u2019s OK to eat them…<\/em><\/p>\n

In the case of eating meat, Rothgerber suggests we have a number of strategies \u2013 around 15 \u2013 which allow us to avoid facing up to the meat paradox. These include pretending that meat has no link to animals… Unfortunately, most of these are derailed by the presence of vegans… when a vegan turns up at a dinner party, suddenly we\u2019re bumped out of the comfortable \u201cmainstream diet\u201d category and into the unsettling \u201cmeat-eating\u201d category. By their mere existence, vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance. And this makes people angry…<\/em><\/p>\n

Decades of psychological research have shown that, when making a decision, people tend to allow themselves to reach their preferred conclusion, as long as they can invent a rational-sounding justification… In the case of meat, this \u201cmotivated reasoning\u201d might lead people to find explanations for why eating animals is the correct decision. And one of these is that vegans are bad.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a study led by Julia Minson, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, participants were surveyed about their attitudes towards vegans and then asked to think of three words that they associated with them. Just under half the participants had something negative to say, and intriguingly, 45% included a word which referred to their social characteristics. For example, vegans were allied with the words \u201cweird\u201d, \u201carrogant\u201d, \u201cpreachy\u201d, \u201cmilitant\u201d, \u201cuptight\u201d, \u201cstupid\u201d, and \u2013 mysteriously \u2013 \u201csadistic\u201d.<\/em>\u00a0 SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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