The psychological and ideological foundations of meat consumption, vegetarianism, and veganism

<p>Despite increasing evidence suggesting that plant-based diets may have multiple benefits over animal-based diets (e.g., Craig & Mangels, 2009; Stehfest, et al., 2009), vegetarians and vegans tend to represent a minority of most Western populations. This thesis investigated the social and ideological foundations of perceptions of vegetarians and vegans in Western societies, and also explored the potential role of visions of the future in motivating support for social change towards plant-based diets. For my first two studies, I adopted a mixed methods approach to understanding perceptions of vegetarians and vegans in Western societies (Creswell, 2014). Study 1 was a thematic analysis of 44 online discussion forums containing evaluations of vegetarians and vegans as social groups, and the analysis was informed by discursive and rhetorical psychology (Billig, 1996; Potter, 1996). In my interpretations of the data, I highlighted the flexible and argumentative nature of expressing ‘attitudes’ towards vegetarians and vegans. I also discussed these discourses in relation to the wider ideological dilemmas of liberal individualism, rationality versus emotions, diet and health, and the human-animal relationship. In Study 2, I drew on the discourses in Study 1 to develop a survey-based investigation of attitudes towards vegetarians and vegans, in a sample recruited from the general population of Aotearoa New Zealand (N = 1326). Two attitude measures were developed based on a previous scale assessing attitudes towards vegetarians (Chin, Fisak & Sims, 2002). Attitudes towards both vegetarians and vegans were generally positive; however, attitudes towards vegans were significantly less positive than attitudes towards vegetarians. Subsequent analyses tested two dual-process motivational models of social worldviews, ideological attitudes and outgroup attitudes (Duckitt, 2001), in the prediction of non-vegetarian attitudes towards vegetarians and vegans. The dual-process models fit the data well, suggesting that ideological motivations to maintain social cohesion and social inequality were associated with increasingly less positive attitudes towards vegetarians and vegans. I proposed that these associations may be due to vegetarians and vegans representing a challenge to social traditions, and a rejection of human dominance over animals. In Study 3, I adopted a mixed methods approach to understanding visions of plant-based futures, in a convenience sample of first-year university students (N = 506). Study 3a involved a thematic analysis of participants’ visions of potential future NZ societies, where most of the population now consumes plant-based, vegetarian, or vegan diets. Dominant themes included changes to health, the environment, and the economy, as well as changes to individual traits and values. In Study 3b, non-vegetarian participants were randomly assigned to imagine plant-based, vegetarian or vegan futures, and then completed a survey of collective future dimensions and support for plant-based policies (drawing from Bain, Hornsey, Bongiorno, Kashima, & Crimston, 2013). The strongest predictors of support for plant-based policies were visions of a vegetarian future as reducing societal dysfunction, and visions of a vegan future as increasing warmth in individuals. I concluded the thesis by reviewing the theoretical implications of the current research, discussing future research directions, and proposing some suggestions for the advocacy of plant-based diets.</p>

The psychological and ideological foundations of meat consumption, vegetarianism, and veganism

<p>Despite increasing evidence suggesting that plant-based diets may have multiple benefits over animal-based diets (e.g., Craig & Mangels, 2009; Stehfest, et al., 2009), vegetarians and vegans tend to represent a minority of most Western populations. This thesis investigated the social and ideological foundations of perceptions of vegetarians and vegans in Western societies, and also explored the potential role of visions of the future in motivating support for social change towards plant-based diets. For my first two studies, I adopted a mixed methods approach to understanding perceptions of vegetarians and vegans in Western societies (Creswell, 2014). Study 1 was a thematic analysis of 44 online discussion forums containing evaluations of vegetarians and vegans as social groups, and the analysis was informed by discursive and rhetorical psychology (Billig, 1996; Potter, 1996). In my interpretations of the data, I highlighted the flexible and argumentative nature of expressing ‘attitudes’ towards vegetarians and vegans. I also discussed these discourses in relation to the wider ideological dilemmas of liberal individualism, rationality versus emotions, diet and health, and the human-animal relationship. In Study 2, I drew on the discourses in Study 1 to develop a survey-based investigation of attitudes towards vegetarians and vegans, in a sample recruited from the general population of Aotearoa New Zealand (N = 1326). Two attitude measures were developed based on a previous scale assessing attitudes towards vegetarians (Chin, Fisak & Sims, 2002). Attitudes towards both vegetarians and vegans were generally positive; however, attitudes towards vegans were significantly less positive than attitudes towards vegetarians. Subsequent analyses tested two dual-process motivational models of social worldviews, ideological attitudes and outgroup attitudes (Duckitt, 2001), in the prediction of non-vegetarian attitudes towards vegetarians and vegans. The dual-process models fit the data well, suggesting that ideological motivations to maintain social cohesion and social inequality were associated with increasingly less positive attitudes towards vegetarians and vegans. I proposed that these associations may be due to vegetarians and vegans representing a challenge to social traditions, and a rejection of human dominance over animals. In Study 3, I adopted a mixed methods approach to understanding visions of plant-based futures, in a convenience sample of first-year university students (N = 506). Study 3a involved a thematic analysis of participants’ visions of potential future NZ societies, where most of the population now consumes plant-based, vegetarian, or vegan diets. Dominant themes included changes to health, the environment, and the economy, as well as changes to individual traits and values. In Study 3b, non-vegetarian participants were randomly assigned to imagine plant-based, vegetarian or vegan futures, and then completed a survey of collective future dimensions and support for plant-based policies (drawing from Bain, Hornsey, Bongiorno, Kashima, & Crimston, 2013). The strongest predictors of support for plant-based policies were visions of a vegetarian future as reducing societal dysfunction, and visions of a vegan future as increasing warmth in individuals. I concluded the thesis by reviewing the theoretical implications of the current research, discussing future research directions, and proposing some suggestions for the advocacy of plant-based diets.</p>

Updating A Time-Series of Survey Questions: The Case of Abortion Attitudes in the General Social Survey

Long-running surveys need a systematic way to reflect social change and to keep items relevant to respondents, especially when they ask about controversial subjects, or they threaten the items' validity. We propose a protocol for updating measures that preserves content and construct validity. First, substantive experts articulate the current and anticipated future terms of debate. Then survey experts use this substantive input and their knowledge of existing measures to develop and pilot a large battery of new items. Third, researchers analyze the pilot data to select items for the survey of record. Finally, the items appear on the survey-of-record, available to the whole user community. Surveys-of-record have procedures for changing content that determine if the new items appear just once or become part of the core. We provide the example of developing new abortion attitude measures in the General Social Survey. Current questions ask whether abortion should be legal under varying circumstances. The new abortion items ask about morality, access, state policy, and interpersonal dynamics. They improve content and construct validity and add new insights into Americans' abortion attitudes.

Body gaze as a marker of sexual objectification: A new scale for pervasive gaze and gaze provocation behaviours in heterosexual women and men

Body gaze behaviour is assumed to be a key feature of sexual objectification. However, there are few self-report gaze measures available and none capturing behaviour which seeks to provoke body gaze from others. Across two studies, we used existing self-report instruments and measurement of eye movements to validate a new self-report scale to measure pervasive body gaze behaviour and body gaze provocation behaviour in heterosexual women and men. In Study 1, participants (N = 1113) completed a survey with newly created items for pervasive body gaze and body gaze provocation behaviour measures. Participants also completed pre-existing measures of body attitude measures, sexual assault attitudes, pornography use, fitness behaviours and relationship status. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across independent samples suggested a 12-item scale for men and women to separately measure pervasive (5 items) and provocation (7 items) gaze behaviour towards the opposite sex. The two scales yielded excellent internal consistency estimates (.86 - .89) and promising convergent validity via positive correlations with body and sexual attitudes. In Study 2, a subsample (N = 168) of participants from Study 1 completed an eye tracking task to capture their gaze behaviour towards matched images of partially and fully dressed female and male subjects. Men exhibited body-biased gaze behaviour towards all the female imagery, whereas women exhibited head-biased gaze behaviour towards fully clothed male imagery. Importantly, self-reported body gaze correlated positively with objectively-measured body gaze behaviour. Both scales showed good test retest reliability and were positively correlated with sexual assault attitudes and pornography use.

Implicit attitudes matter for social judgments of others’ preference, but do not make those judgments more or less accurate

Drawing from a large dataset of responses to implicit and explicit attitude measures and social judgments of others’ preferences (N = 97,176) across 95 distinct attitude domains, this Registered Report utilized a componential analysis of judgment accuracy to examine whether implicit attitudes affected the accuracy of social judgment. I found evidence that judgments of the population’s preferences were associated with the population’s true implicit (but not explicit) attitudes, and that individuals projected their implicit attitudes in addition to the projection of explicit attitudes when judging the population’s true preferences. However, I found no evidence that stronger or weaker implicit attitudes were uniquely associated with greater or less accuracy in judging the population’s true preferences. These results provide generalizable evidence that implicit attitudes matter greatly for social judgment accuracy in distinct and nuanced ways.

Effect of Viewing Emotionally Laden Paintings on Attitudes of Male Sex Offenders

Creative arts are overly caricatured as non-essentially flossy and unmerited luxury particularly when executed in a jail setting. However, research suggests that art-based prison programs can significantly bear upon the lives of offenders. In this paper the authors make reference to this connotation in order to investigate the potential for an art-based prison program involving repeated viewing of emotionally laden paintings to influence attitudes towards crime among male sex offenders. Towards this goal the authors used a one group pretest-posttest quasi experimental design to assess the participants’ general attitudes to offending (G scale), anticipation of re-offending (A scale), victim hurt denial(V scale) and evaluation of crime as worthwhile(E scale). Rape and defilement convicts aged 18-45 years from Nairobi West Prison participated in sessions that were facilitated three times a week during the 5 week program. A paired T- Test showed statistically significant improvements between post-test1 and pre-test (t=-3.117, p-value=0.003) and between post-test2 and pre-test (t=-2.161, p-value=0.035). Positive results were found for three attitude measures; G scale, A-scale and E-scale. The findings suggest that participation in art prison programs involving repeated viewing of emotive artwork can be an effective intervention resulting in attitude change among male sex offenders.

Information Culture and Effective Use of Information Tools at Work

Office work is increasingly collaborative in the 21st century. ‘Information culture' is a broad set of values and behavioural workplace norms pertaining to information management and use. To investigate whether information culture influences use of collaborative information tools, conceptualization and measurement instruments are presented for information culture and measuring effective use. ‘Group adoption' is a behavioural proxy for effective use, and ‘information sharing' and ‘proactive information use' were selected as behavioural proxies for information culture. In a study of an engineering firm, group adoption was correlated with actual use of an information tool and with two tool attitude measures. Group adoption was also correlated with both information culture measures. The findings here suggest new avenues of research into the broader applicability of group adoption, and the ways in which conceptualization and measurement of information culture may be further developed.

The predictive power of farmers’ risk attitude measures elicited by experimental methods

Aim of study: Farmers’ behavior is shaped by their individual attitudes towards risk. Consequently, an understanding of the heterogeneous risk attitudes among farmers is key to predicting their decision-making. Therefore, there is a need for reliable methods to assess individuals’ risk attitudes. The main objective of this paper was to contribute to the existing literature about the external validity of risk attitude measures obtained with diverse experimental methods.Area of study: Irrigated agriculture in a Mediterranean climate region.Material and methods: Two different experimental methods widely applied in the agricultural sector were used to elicit farmers’ risk attitudes in a sample of irrigators in southern Spain: the Eckel and Grossman lottery-choice task and a self-assessment general risk question. We evaluated the explanatory power of both measures for the farming risk borne by farmers, using an approach based on dispersion measures of farming returns.Main results: Results revealed stability across these elicitation methods, but the study yielded no evidence of statistical correlation with the farming risk actually borne by farmers, suggesting that it may not be advisable to use these methods for directly predicting farmers’ decision-making in modeling exercises.Research highlights: The most relevant innovation of this paper was the validation approach followed, based on measures assessing the overall level of farming risk borne by individual producers, and the complementary analyses controlling for key variables that could affect farmer risk-taking.

Moving beyond the Process-Dissociation procedure towards fine-grained memory and attitude measures in Evaluative Conditioning

Research on Evaluative Conditioning (EC) that relied on a Process Dissociation (PD) procedure supports the possibility of attitude learning effects acquired or maintained in the absence of explicit memory. In the present research we argue that basic assumptions inherent to the PD procedure are both theoretically and empirically unjustified. We introduce and empirically validate an alternative fine-grained assessment of subjective memory states. The data of the validation study (i) question central assumptions of the PD procedure, (ii) fail to support the assumptions posited in dual-learning models of attitudes that attitudes can be acquired or maintained without memory, and (iii) highlight the importance of distinguishing between objective and subjective memory. We discuss the implications of the present findings for attitude research.