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

动物源性食物含量高的饮食与负面的环境和个人健康结果有关（Rust等人，2020年）。然而，吃动物在西方文化中是高度规范的（美国农业部，2018）。食物偏好形成于儿童时期，这是一个以增强对动物福利的道德关注为特征的发育时期（McGuire等人，2022年）。与此同时，儿童使用社会规范来驾驭道德情境。在食物方面，没有研究调查年龄和社会规范之间的相互作用。随着食肉规范在发展过程中变得内化，饮食规范可能会指导早期食肉可接受性的评估。这就提出了一些重要的问题，将在拟议的研究中加以解决。首先，孩子们什么时候开始开始理解吃某些动物比吃其他动物更容易被社会接受？第二，在社会规范特别突出的情况下，儿童如何评价和证明吃肉行为是合理的（例如，圣诞节），相比世俗消费。第三，如何评价那些违反社会食肉规范的同龄人？人类与非人类动物的关系可能涉及到一种道德冲突，即在照顾某些动物的同时，默许通过消费对其他动物的伤害。这种“肉悖论”助长了认知失调的状态，人们认识到他们的饮食行为与他们对动物的道德关注之间的不一致（Rothgerber，2020）。社会规范是一个用来尽量减少这种冲突的有力工具。先前的研究集中在吃肉合理化的4个N上，这是一系列自我服务的理由，这些理由表明吃肉是自然的、正常的、必要的和好的（Piazza等人，2015）。然而，有限的实证工作调查了社会规范是如何体现在儿童和青少年的食肉行为的评价。这一点很重要，因为社会规范的新显着性已被证明会影响儿童在其他决策领域（如资源分配）的评估和推理（McGuire等人，2017），社会排斥（Hitti & Killen，2015），以及评估偏离内部群体期望的同龄人（McGuire等人，2019年）。拟议的项目将首次调查社会规范理解的发展趋势如何影响儿童和青少年对食肉行为的评价。此外，该研究将使用新的范式进行研究，以检查儿童和青少年如何评价一个挑战既定吃肉规范的越轨同伴群体成员。这一问题在食品方面尤为重要，因为离经叛道的个人代表着潜在的变革者，他们挑战着有利于更可持续的植物替代品的规范性做法。因此，人们对这些越轨行为的反应有可能加强或改变现有的社会规范。

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.