People typically extend limited moral standing to animals reared for food. Prominent perspectives in the literature on animal-human relations characterize this phenomenon as an outcome of moral disengagement: in other words, a strategy that protects people from moral self-condemnation. To provide a direct test of this hypothesis, we exposed people to a self-affirmation manipulation, and hypothesized that this would lead them to be more critical of their own meat eating and be more appreciative of animals' minds and suffering. Three experiments tested this idea in meat-eaters from the United Kingdom. Two initial experiments (n = 244, n = 247) found that affirming the self made eating animals seem more morally wrong. However, a subsequent pre-registered experiment (n = 719) failed to replicate this effect. In addition, this experiment found no effects of the affirmation procedure on specific beliefs about eating animals that participants consume compared to animals they do not consume. A mini-meta analysis of all the experiments found only weak evidence in support of the idea that affirming the self makes eating meat seem more morally wrong. There was no evidence that the affirmation procedure affected beliefs about animal minds.

人们通常将有限的道德立场延伸到饲养食物的动物上。文献中关于动物与人际关系的突出观点将此现象描述为道德脱离接触的结果：换句话说，这是一种保护人们免受道德自责的策略。为了直接检验该假设，我们使人们受到自我肯定的操纵，并假设这将使他们对自己的肉食更加挑剔，并更欣赏动物的思想和痛苦。三个实验在英国的食肉者中测试了这个想法。两项初步实验（n  = 244，n  = 247）发现，肯定自食动物似乎在道德上是错误的。然而，随后的预注册的实验（Ñ = 719）无法复制此效果。另外，该实验未发现确认过程对参与者食用和不食用动物的特定饮食观念没有影响。对所有实验进行的微型元分析发现，只有微弱的证据支持这样一种观点，即肯定自我会使吃肉看起来在道德上更加错误。没有证据表明确认过程会影响人们对动物思想的信仰。