In 2000, the Journal of Social Psychology published “Values and beliefs of vegetarians and omnivores”, a paper I co-authored with friends Mike Allen and Mike Dunne and academic supervisor Sik-Hung Ng. This was one of the first psychology papers about people who choose to eat, or abstain from eating, meat. I’m a little proud of it, though it looks rather unsophisticated now.
Allen, with whom I shared an office while studying, was the motivator of this paper, because he was vegetarian. Well, he was more of a processed-fooditarian who didn’t so much subsist only on vegetables, as on processed foods that didn’t contain meat.
Anyhow, Allen also introduced me to the work of Carol J Adams; specifically her 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat. Adams isn’t a psychological researcher, and her online bios describe her, among other things, as a feminist-vegan advocate.
To boil it down, the argument in The Sexual Politics of Meat can be seen on the cover – a drawing of a kneeling woman, apparently naked except for a hat, lines drawn over her body representing popular cuts of meat. Yes, as I read that back it sounds pretty on the nose.
Adams draws a connection between the way we treat animals and the way that we treat people, particularly women. We won’t eliminate exploitation of women, and sexism and other -isms, until we confront our exploitation of animals, she argues.
Patriarchal values drive both our use and consumption of animals, and how we treat women and other minorities.
At the time the Mikes and I wrote the paper, nobody had really tested this idea “empirically” – by collecting data and analysing it. So off we went. Allen and I collecting separate surveys. Mine were about the values underlying voters’ political behaviour, with a few diet questions thrown in, and his were about the values associated with decision-making about things like cars, sunglasses and, of course, meat.
Basically, we found that back in the 1990s we could reliably predict whether people were vegetarians or meat-eaters based on the values they held as important. Vegetarians placed greater emphasis on universalist values such as equality and wisdom, while meat-eaters placed relatively greater importance on tradition, power and hierarchy. Look right there, Carol J Adams might say: patriarchal values.
I’ve been thinking about this as we look at what’s happening in the world. Russia and Ukraine trading drones. Hamas and Israel trading missiles. In the US, Donald Trump is railing against Harvard University, claiming it’s a hotbed of anti-Semitism.
Um, Harvard isn’t a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Unless they were hiding it under the rug during the two sabbaticals I spent there as a visiting professor. I don’t mean for a second that nobody there has ever expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, rather, it’s not the widespread disease it’s portrayed as.
I also find it paradoxical for a conservative president and administration to condemn anti-Semitism on college campuses when it has been so often demonstrated on both the left (anti-Zionism) and the right (George Soros and globalist “bankers”). I recently reviewed a manuscript submitted to a general science journal looking at sentiment towards Jews and Muslims in a representative sample, and was horrified that four in 10 of the American participants endorsed explicitly anti-Jewish or explicitly anti-Muslim views. Some expressed both.
In fact, the double-haters illustrate something social psychologists have argued for years: generalised prejudice. People who hold antipathy towards one group tend to hold antipathies towards others. Prejudices travel together. Just after the Christchurch terror attacks, I wrote a paper that showed New Zealanders’ feelings towards Muslims correlated with their views on Jews, as well as Christians and Hindus.
Adams wasn’t writing specifically about Jews, Christians or Hindus, but her argument still applies – as long as we denigrate one group, we’re likely to denigrate others.
