Morality

While felt ambivalence is thought to drive behavior change, the dynamics and boundary conditions of this effect have been underspecified. We conducted a panel study (N = 808 German and Dutch students) in the context of meat consumption and investigated the dynamics of meat-related ambivalence, meat consumption, and moralization over 7 months using Cross-Lagged Panel Models. We expected that omnivores eat less meat when ambivalence pushes them toward moralization, whereas veg*ans (vegetarians and vegans) show more dietary lapses when ambivalence pulls them away from moralization. Congruently, results indicate that ambivalence motivated omnivores to eat less meat over time, primarily when their conflicts involved moral dimensions about farm animals, sustainability, or social context; and veg*ans were likelier to violate their diets when ambivalence centered on positive sensory associations with meat. We conclude that ambivalence motivates behavior change, especially if people are pushed toward or pulled away from moralization.

The domain of meat consumption has become a blossoming area for advancing our knowledge of how people experience and resolve cognitive conflicts. Within the field, however, the conceptual similarities and differences between ambivalence and dissonance have been underspecified. This has led to seemingly inconsistent conclusions about the experiences and downstream consequences of cognitive conflict. We therefore examine the tacit assumptions in the field and integrate the two kinds of literature on meat-related cognitive conflicts. In a comparative review, we specifically delineate (a) which groups of people are affected by which of the two meat-related conflicts, (b) what constitutes these conflicts, (c) when these conflicts are experienced, and (d) what downstream consequences result from these conflicts. We conclude that meat-related ambivalence is experienced when inconsistent attitudes become accessible and that meat-related dissonance is experienced when inconsistencies between attitudes and commitments become accessible. Our integrative perspective challenges established assertions regarding meat-related conflict and offers various theoretical and practical implications. One such implication concerns, for example, how cognitive conflict is associated with behavior change and maintenance depending on people’s commitment to eating meat. We hope that this will help researchers and practitioners to apply the insights from this flourishing field of research.

Meat production and its consumption harm animals, the environment, and human health; nevertheless, many people like to eat meat. If people become aware of this so-called meat paradox, they experience an aversive cognitive conflict. People, therefore, have to eschew meat if they permanently want to resolve this conflict. Eschewing meat is demanding, however, because people have to resist their temptation to eat meat and challenge social norms. In the present research, we thus conducted two pre-registered studies to investigate how people may overcome these obstacles: We hypothesized that people may go through a hedonic shift in which they establish cognitive consistency by forming univalent instead of ambivalent attitudes and that this process is fueled by the moral emotion disgust. In Study 1, we found that veg*ans who pursued moral goals with their diet reported more disgust towards meat, which was associated with reduced meat-related ambivalence. In Study 2, we found that disgust towards meat was again associated with decreased meat-related ambivalence. That is, veg*ans and omnivores similarly reported greater disgust after reading a text describing bad hygienic conditions in meat production. Besides this physical disgust, they also experienced heightened disgust if they read a text on animal cruelty in meat production. This moral disgust, however, was only elicited in people who did not morally disengage from their harmful behavior, i.e., in people who attributed relatively high emotional and mental capacities towards animals. While the latter findings of Study 2 are rather exploratory, taken together our findings suggest that morality and disgust may indeed promote cognitive consistency. The outlined processes thus could play a pivotal role in adopting and maintaining meat-less diets.