This is odd to me. I see how committing to be vegan can strengthen one’s belief in the importance of animal suffering. But my not-very-educated guess is that the effect is more akin to why buying iPhone/Android would strengthen your belief into the superiority of one to another. But I don’t see how would it help one to understand/consider animal experiences and needs.
I haven’t read the paper in depth but searched for relevant keywords and found:
Additionally, a sequence of five studies from Jonas Kunst and Sigrid Hohle demonstrates that processing meat, beheading a whole roasted pig, watching a meat advertisement without a live animal versus one with a live animal, describing meat production as “harvesting” versus “killing” or “slaughtering,” and describing meat as “beef/pork” rather than “cow/pig” all decreased empathy for the animal in question and, in several cases, significantly increased willingness to eat meat rather than an alternative vegetarian dish.33
Psychologists involved in these and several other studies believe that these phenomena 34 occur because people recognize an incongruity between eating animals and seeing them as beings with mental life and moral status, so they are motivated to resolve this cognitive dissonance by lowering their estimation of animal sentience and moral status. Since these affective attitudes influence the decisions we make, eating meat and embracing the idea of animals as food negatively influences our individual and social treatment of nonhuman animals.
The cited paper (33, 34) do not provide much evidence to support your claim among people who spend significant time reflecting on welfare of animals.
This is odd to me. I see how committing to be vegan can strengthen one’s belief in the importance of animal suffering. But my not-very-educated guess is that the effect is more akin to why buying iPhone/Android would strengthen your belief into the superiority of one to another. But I don’t see how would it help one to understand/consider animal experiences and needs.
I haven’t read the paper in depth but searched for relevant keywords and found:
The cited paper (33, 34) do not provide much evidence to support your claim among people who spend significant time reflecting on welfare of animals.