Check out Daniel’s new paper in Motivation and Emotion!

This paper compares vegetarians who are motivated by each of the three leading reasons for giving up meat — animals, health, and the environment. First, he found that both animal-motivated and environmentally motivated vegetarians view their diets as more grounded in their moral beliefs than do health-motivated vegetarians. Second, he explained why vegetarians with different motivations may follow their diets with varying rates of adherence. He found that animal-motivated vegetarians followed their diets more strictly than did either health-motivated or environmentally motivated vegetarians, an effect mediated by animal-motivated vegetarians’ greater feelings of disgust toward meat. Despite being as highly morally motivated as animal-motivated vegetarians, environmentally motivated vegetarians did not report high levels of disgust toward meat; they were similar to those reported by health-motivated vegetarians. These results challenge the notion that people’s moral beliefs about eating meat directly cause them to be disgusted by meat. Rather, these findings suggest that associating meat with its animal origins is a more probable cause of meat disgust.