The morality of eating meat: the role of social norms in childhood and adolescence

Diets high in animal-derived foods are associated with negative environmental and personal health outcomes (Rust et al., 2020). Yet, eating animals is highly normative in Western cultures (USDA, 2018). Food preferences are formed in childhood, a developmental period characterized by enhanced moral concern for animal welfare (McGuire et al., 2022). At the same time, children use social norms to navigate moral situations. In the context of food, no research has investigated the interplay between age and social norms. As meat-eating norms become internalized during development, dietary norms likely guide evaluations of meat-eating acceptability from an early age. This raises important questions that will be addressed in the proposed research. First, when do children begin to understand it may be more socially acceptable to eat some animals compared to others? Second, how do children evaluate and justify meat-eating behaviour in contexts where social norms are especially salient (e.g., Christmas), compared to mundane consumption. And third, how are peers who defy social norms of meat-eating evaluated?

Human relationships with non-human animals can involve a moral conflict between caring for certain animals, while tacitly endorsing harm against others through consumption. This "meat-paradox" fosters a state of cognitive dissonance, where individuals recognise the inconsistency between their dietary behaviour and their moral concern for animals (Rothgerber, 2020). Social norms are one powerful tool used to minimize this conflict. Prior research has focused on the 4 Ns of meat-eating rationalization, a collection of self-serving justifications which state eating meat is natural, normal, necessary, and nice (Piazza et al., 2015). However, limited empirical work has investigated how social norms are represented in children's and adolescents' evaluations of meat-eating behaviour. This is important, as the emerging salience of social norms has been shown to influence children's evaluation and reasoning in other decision-making domains, such as resource allocation (McGuire et al., 2017), social exclusion (Hitti & Killen, 2015), and evaluating peers who deviate from ingroup expectations (McGuire et al., 2019).

The proposed project will, for the first time, investigate how developmental trends in social norm understanding influence children's and adolescents' evaluations of behaviour in the context of meat-eating. Moreover, the research will conduct studies using novel paradigms to examine how children and adolescents evaluate a deviant peer group member who challenges the established meat-eating norm. This question is particularly important in the context of food, as deviant individuals represent potential changemakers, challenging normative practises in favour of more sustainable plant-based alternatives. Therefore, how people react to these deviants has the potential to reinforce or change existing social norms.