The lie that many people who eat meat tell themselves

In the third experiment, also conducted with a British sample of pig-eaters, half the participants read material about how dogs are more intelligent than pigs, while the other half read the reverse — pigs are more intelligent than dogs. Now, half the participants simply read that material, while the other half were told to imagine John, a different person, reading that material, and to then anticipate his reactions to it. As in the other experiments, after reading the intelligence materials the respondents were asked how much moral standing they would grant to pigs.

The researchers found that when taking someone else’s perspective — that is, John’s — the high-versus-low intelligence divide mattered a great deal. Participants imagined that John would rate pigs as having much higher moral standing in the high-intelligence condition than the low-intelligence one. When the participants took their own perspective, “intelligence information did not significantly influence their judgments.” Statistically, they gave “smart” and “dumb” pigs about the same moral standing.

Overall, these results support the researchers’ hypothesis that people only fully factor in animal intelligence in a “motivated” manner — that is, when it serves their own behavior and beliefs. Intelligence is a straightforward-sounding way to justify decisions that, in many cases, were pressed on omnivores by their cultures, their childhood experiences, and whatever else (plus, meat tastes good). Again: We’d like to think that our decisions about which foods to eat and which to shun — and our other moral decisions — come from some sort of rational calculation, but that’s frequently false.