Cognitive Dissonance in Veganism and Our Consumer Behavior

Photo by Toni Cuenca, Unsplash

Formidable wardrobe, heavy breathing, and recruiting people to join the dark side - what Darth Vader attempted to do in 1983, the bearded, Whole Foods shopping villains of modern society attempt today.

Except, it’s not the Dark Side, but the Green Side of kale, arugula, and romaine.

With global warming on the rise, 19 billion chickens, 1.4 billion cows, and about 1 billion sheep and pigs all reared for food; it might be time to conquer planet Earth with a vegan lightsaber.

2019 is the year of the vegans, proclaimed by the Economist and Forbes. Gone are the days where “Dry January” (abstinence from alcohol) and “Stoptober” (abstinence from smoking) are the only months of the year that cultivate self-improvement. With 250,000 people participating in the “Veganuary” (abstinence from meat-based diets) movement in  2019, not only is self-improvement yearned for, but also compassion toward the animals we share planet Earth with. 

Veganism is no longer practiced by a cult that’s powered by early morning yoga and avocado toasts. Vegans in the US increased by 600% from 2014 to 2017, equivalent to more than the population of Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and Houston combined.

When James Brown sang "This is a man's world," he had no idea the vegan world would be led by young women - 79% of them below the age of 35 to be precise. Perhaps "men made the cars," but it's indisputably the women driving us to a more sustainable world. Beyoncé was right: Girls run the world.

Today, we’re in the age of the Vegan Enlightenment. Suddenly, steak-obsessed dads know what a plant-based lifestyle is, angry carnivores eat raw cow hearts at vegan festivals, and a man resigns from his job after making anti-vegan jokes. Yes, that made headline news and yes, this is the world we live in now.

So why do so many people still look at vegans like they run some underground fight club? And why do non-vegans’ argue that “if you love animals so much, why are you eating their food away?” 

To understand this divergence, we first have to dive into the psychology of morality.

The Psychology Behind Your Carnivore Diet

We tend to separate our values from our own actions. Here are simple questions to prove this: Do you think animal torture is cruel? Do you eat factory-farmed meat? 

The odds are you disagree with animal cruelty, yet still, eat meat reared in horrible conditions. This psychological conflict between your preference for gorging on meat and moral response to animal suffering is what psychologists call the meat paradox. In short, we don’t want to inflict pain on animals, but we still like to eat meat anyway. 

The paradox in the meat paradox is that moral nature holds meat-eaters at gunpoint with the question: How can I be a good person, and still eat meat?

It works like this.

There are two general systems our brain bases its moral decisions on. The first system is emotional, quick, and intuitive. The second is rational, effortful, and explicit. The difference between them can be seen based on your action in the Classic Trolley Car Problem:

You’re confronted with a choice: Five people are tied to the train tracks on which a train is steering towards. You are standing on a bridge with a person in front of you. The only way to save those five people is if you push down that person to fall on the tracks to stop the incoming train.

Your brain’s first system relies on its emotional center, the limbic structures. This response comes on quickly, reflecting your emotional reaction. It would be the one to tell you not to push the person because it’s just wrong.

Your brain’s second system is situated right above your eyes. Neuroscientists call this the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, known as the CEO of your actions. Unlike your emotional center, your brain’s CEO constantly assesses the rationality behind your choices and would argue that five lives are worth more than one life, driving you to push the person.

In the case of veganism, acknowledging that you’re sparing the suffering of an animal should outweigh the temporary delight of eating a steak.

Our two systems are always in battle every time we’re confronted with a moral question. The prize for the winner? Merely getting to answer the question. 

Whichever system we use, we strive for consistent decisions that are in line with our general values. But sometimes we still go rogue and behave inconsistently. When this happens, we feel a special kind of mental distress. Think of the feeling one could have while eating donuts during a healthy diet or smoking cigarettes while attempting to stop. Psychologists call this hint of distress cognitive dissonance, wherein a psychic tension must be resolved. Just as we strive for consistency, we also strive to minimize dissonance. 

So what’s the solution to the dissonance caused by the meat paradox? We either change our behavior or our beliefs. We either justify why we have to eat meat or we turn vegan, vegetarian, or pescatarian (whatever suits our moral compass, really). 

To cope with our carnivorousness, we suppress the knowledge that animals can suffer. In a study, one group ate nuts, and the other ate beef. The beef group was asked to consider the cow’s suffering. To no surprise, they assessed the cow’s suffering lower than the nuts group.

To make ourselves feel good about our decision to eat meat, companies use many tricks to numb our feelings toward animal suffering. And they start with the neuromarketing behind the packaging.

The Effect of Cognitive Dissonance in Packaging

The animal agriculture industry contributes around $132.8 billion to the US economy on its own. Since our consumer behavior responds to different incentives, our relationship with morality is challenged when pricing is thrown into the mix. Price tags and crafty marketing practices cast a transparent veil that separates us from the origins of the products we buy. 

When they say you can “separate the art from the artist,” they also mean you can “separate the meat from the animal.” It's called veal instead of a baby calf, beef instead of cow, bacon instead of pig. Once chopped up in pieces unrecognizable to the animal it came from, they are packaged and personified with jolly cartoon characters.

Companies either make the animal look cuter—with big round, cartoonish eyes—or have their pieces packaged to make it hard to imagine they were sourced from an animal altogether. What this either-or situation indeed covers up is the reality of animal cruelty. 

Today, more and more people are introducing plant-based foods into their diets. Though the meat substitute market is relatively small, it’s expected to grow $2 billion more from $4.65 billion in 5 years, making veganism the fastest growing lifestyle movement in Europe and the US. 

Plant-based meat substitute companies Beyond Meat and Meatless already produce low-cost vegan chicken wings, burgers, and sausages. Beyond Meat has been so successful that it’s been listed on the stock market with post-IPO gains up by 734%.

So at this point: Why should we care? And what do we do now? 

As we’ve seen, we’re good at contradicting our actions with thoughts. Similar to how the moon has a dark side that we don’t see, we shouldn't forget that the packaged meat we eat has one too. 

The only way out of our moral inconsistency is to face conversations about humanity, accept our own hypocrisies, look at the foundation of our underlying guilty pleasures, and attempt to rebuild them.

Just like Luke Skywalker had to choose a side, you have to choose too. As Master Yoda would say: “Choose wisely, you must. And remember: Avocado salad the green side has. Hmmm.”

---

What’s Next?

---

References

Association for Psychological Science (aps): The Meat Paradox: How Carnivores Think About Dinner, Wray Herbert

Cision: North America Meat Substitute Market (2017 - 2023), ReportBuyer

Cision: Top Trends in Prepared Foods 2017: Exploring trends in meat, fish and seafood; pasta, noodles and rice; prepared meals; savory deli food; soup; and meat substitutes, ReportBuyer

FAO. (2006). Livestock's long shadow. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

Forbes: Top Health Food Trends To Go Mainstream in 2019, Eustacia Huen 

Greene, J. D., Nystrom, L. E., Engell, A. D., Darley, J. M. & Cohen, J. D. The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron 44, 389–400 (2004)

Lars, U. (2016, May 22). The Ethics of the Meat Paradox - Volume 38, Issue 2, Summer 2016. Retrieved from https://www.pdcnet.org/enviroethics/content/enviroethics_2016_0038_0002_0131_0144

Loughnan, S., Bastian, B., & Haslam, N. (2014, March). The Psychology of Eating Animals . Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721414525781

Market Insider: Beyond Meat Extends Its post-IPO Surge to 734%, Carmen Reinicke

Pascual, L., Rodrigues, P., & Gallardo-Pujol, D. (2013, September 12). How does morality work in the brain? A functional and structural perspective of moral behavior. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3770908/

The Economist: Counting Chicken, The Economist online

The Economist: The Year of the Vegan, John Parker

The Vegan Society: Find Out How Many Vegans There Are In Great Britain

Toprntobesn: The Rise of Veganism, Jonathan Beachy

United States Department of Agriculture - Economic Research Service (USDA ERS): Ag and Food Sector and the Economy

Vice: What the Waitrose Editor’s Vegan Joke Tells Us About The Absurd “Free Speech” Debate, Tom Whyman