Joaquín Alcañiz Colomer, predoctoral researcher at CIMCYC and member of the Psychology of Social Problems group (HUM-289), has participated in a review and synthesis article of the scientific literature on human-animal relationships. The review, conducted together with Sarah Gradidge (Anglia Ruskin University), and Steve Loughnan (University of Edinburgh), focused on the cognitive strategies people use to justify the harm caused to farm animals, specifically dehumanization and denial of mind.
Dehumanization occurs when other people or groups are denied their human qualities. This is not a casual process, but is motivated and has important consequences. Dehumanization is used to justify, facilitate and excuse harm done to other persons or groups. This review argues that people use this same flexibility in attributing mind and humanity to nonhuman animals by focusing on farm animals. Although animals cannot be dehumanized (since they are not human), there is ample empirical evidence that a similar process of minimizing their mental capacities or denying their "mind" (e.g., seeing them as incapable of thinking intelligently, feeling emotions or pain) operates and contributes to justifying the harm we carry out against them.
Thus, these strategies are part of a larger process, known as the "meat paradox", i.e., how most people claim to care about animals and yet those same people (paradoxically) consume animals and animal products, which inevitably cause harm to them. When we deny that animals possess minds, we weaken the reasons why farm animals are of moral concern, attenuating the guilt that might be experienced for harming them. For example, several studies show that people tend to make lower attributions of mind to farm animals than to other animals not perceived as "edible."
In this regard, a number of strategies have been proposed that could be employed to restore moral concern for animals and thereby improve and protect their welfare, although the research that has tested them does not provide clear results. For example, one might expect that if the lack of moral concern arises from denying animals their mental capacity, one strategy would be to work towards viewing farm animals differently. At the moment, however, this strategy has not been shown to be effective. Thus, even if people's beliefs that farm animals are sociable and intelligent increase, moral concern for them does not.
Finally, in our opinion, it is worth examining the similarities and differences between the dehumanization of human exogroups and the denial of the mind of animal exogroups with the aim of finding mechanisms to increase the moral concern aroused by the latter and improve their living conditions.
Reference: Gradidge, S., Alcañiz-Colomer, J., & Loughnan, S. (2023). Inhuman animals: moving dehumanization into the domain of human-animal relations. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 50, 101249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2023.101249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2023.101249.
Photo credits photo number 1: Photo by John Riojas on Unsplash
Photo credits photo number 2: Photo by Ben Mater on Unsplas