Selfishly Eating Up the Planet? The influence of selfishness, empathy, motivation, religion, and gender on the consumption of meat and willingness to reduce animal product consumption

Selfishly Eating Up the Planet? The influence of selfishness, empathy, motivation, religion, and gender on the consumption of meat and willingness to reduce animal product consumption

As the human behaviour of eating animal products is linked to several global issues spanning the environment, health, and the suffering of trillions of animals, understanding the psychology of animal product consumption and reduction may contribute to solving them. Psychological selfishness has not been explored in this area and was combined in this research with indicators of animal-oriented empathy, motivations, willingness, religion, and gender to determine what role they played in meat consumption and animal product reduction via a quantitative and cross-sectional research design. As this thesis is by publication, three articles describe the research carried out. An Australian sample, N = 497 for the first and third studies and N = 492 in the second were surveyed via Zoho Survey online. Article one reported that higher empathy and lower selfishness were accompanied by lower meat consumption for males but not females, suggesting other factors may influence meat consumption for females. Animal, environmental, and health motivations were positively associated with the psychological factors for males, implying that all motivations are convincing to males. Females’ health and animal motivations were positively associated with empathy, and selfishness with environmental motivation. In article two, environmental motivation was the most significant influence of the three motivations on willingness to reduce animal product consumption. The next was animal motivation. In contrast, health motivation had a negative association with willingness; the belief that meat is healthy may be working against willingness. One psychological factor, pathological selfishness, predicted willingness. Article three revealed higher meat consumption groups reported higher selfishness. This was superseded by the interaction effect, where religious groups with higher meat consumption had higher pathological selfishness than non-religious high consumers. This thesis met its aim by adding a novel contribution to understanding the psychological and sociodemographic factors related to animal product consumption and reduction.

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