Jared Piazza

Lancaster University | LU · Department of Psychology

Research shows that adult meat eaters strategically distort or disregard information about animals (e.g., their intelligence) that is problematic for meat consumption. However, the development of such behaviours is not well understood. Two studies tested whether primary‐school‐age children exhibit motivated use of information about food animals as...

New food technologies such as cultured meat, precision fermentation, and plant-based alternatives may one day supplant traditional modes of animal farming. Nonetheless, very little is known about how traditional animal farmers perceive these new products, despite being directly impacted by their advance. The present study explored the views of live...

Plant-forward diets offer a potential solution to many of the health and ecological crises that we find ourselves facing today. A key barrier to the adoption and maintenance of plant-forward diets is an anticipated lack of support from family members, friends and romantic partners. The present study examined how relational climate (i.e., the cohesi...

Many children care about animals yet are accepting of meat consumption. This may reflect a disconnect between children's meat eating, food-systems knowledge, and their moral evaluations. A theoretical framework is proposed for understanding the developmental trajectory of this disconnection. We discuss its components and the implications for dietar...

There is much disagreement about the claim that impurity constitutes a moral domain. We propose a set of minimal criteria that could help re-orient the field to a direction of consensus in the assessment of this claim. We illustrate how the criteria apply to aspects of the current literature.

Livestock farmers depend on animal slaughter for their livelihood while also being responsible for their animals’ welfare. This study explored how farmers psychologically manage this ambivalent relationship with their animals. Seventy-two meat-eating livestock farmers participated, as well as 99 meat-eating and 103 meat-avoiding, non-farmer pet own...

Despite the established health and ecological benefits of a plant-based diet, the decision to eschew meat and other animal-derived food products remains controversial. So polarising is this topic that anti-vegan communities - groups of individuals who stand vehemently against veganism - have sprung up across the internet. Much scholarship on vegani...

Animal minds are of central importance to debates about their rights and welfare. Remaining ignorant of evidence that animals have minds is therefore likely to facilitate their mistreatment. Studying samples of adults and students from the UK and US we found that, consistent with motivational perspectives on meat consumption, those who were more (v...

Consumers in modern society are often less exposed to meat that resembles the animal, and thus are less familiar with it, making it difficult to disentangle the influence of these two inputs (familiarity vs. animal resemblance) on meat appetite. Across three studies, we sought to systematically disentangle the impact of familiarity and animal resem...

The current study modeled the attributions underlying moral concern for animals during childhood and adulthood with the aim of better understanding how concern for animals develops. In total, 241 children aged 6–10 years and 152 adults appraised a range of animals on seven appraisal dimensions and, subsequently rank-ordered which animals they would...

Pledges are a popular strategy to encourage meat reduction, though experimental studies of their efficacy are lacking. Three-hundred and twenty-five participants from three different countries (UK, Germany, Australia) were randomly assigned to pledge 28 days meat-free or not, and their behavior was tracked via smartphones. Participants answered dai...

It is controversial whether ordinary people regard beliefs about the wrongness of harmful actions as objectively correct. Our deflationary hypothesis, consistent with much of the evidence, is that people are objectivists about harmful actions that are perceived to involve injustice: when two parties disagree about whether such an action is wrong, p...

Positive relationships with pets can sometimes foster more positive judgments of other animals. The present study sought to examine the scope of this “pets as ambassadors” effect in relation to four meaningful animal categories (companion, farmed, predator, and pest) derived from the Animal Images Database (Animal.ID). The Animal.ID contains rating...

Past research has uncovered four common justifications for using animals as food-the 4Ns-that eating meat is Natural, Normal, Necessary, and Nice. The current research investigated the extent to which the 4Ns might apply more generally to other animal uses. Two studies examined the moral justifications people spontaneously offered for various anima...

Understanding consumer perceptions of meat alternatives is key to facilitating a shift toward more sustainable food consumption. Importantly, these perceptions may vary according to the characteristics of the consumer (e.g., preferences, motivations), the product (e.g., sensory attributes) and the encounter (e.g., how the meat alternative is presen...

Recent findings suggest bodily expressions of pride communicate a person is self-interested and meritocratic. Across two studies (combined N=721), we investigated whether these implications retain when pride is expressed with regards to moral achievements where the activity has benefited others. In Study 1, achievers that attained self-benefiting,...

Simple Summary: With the general goal of increasing knowledge about how individuals perceive and evaluate different animals, we provide normative data on an extensive set of open-source animal images, spanning a total of 12 biological categories (e.g., mammals, insects, reptiles, arachnids), on 11 evaluative dimensions (e.g., valence, cuteness, cap...

Theories that view emotions as being related in some way to moral judgments suggest that condemning moral emotions should, at a minimum, be understood by laypeople to coincide with judgments of moral disapproval. Seven studies (total N = 826) tested the extent to which anger and disgust align with this criterion. We observed that while anger is und...

Harm-centric accounts of judgments of moral wrongdoing argue that moral judgments are fundamentally based on appraisals of harm. However, past research has failed to operationally discriminate harm appraisals from appraisals related to injustice. Four studies carefully discriminated harm qua pain/suffering from injustice, alongside appraisals relat...

Three studies investigated whether thoughts and feelings generated by baby animals might oppose appetite for meat. A prestudy established babyness as an important factor predicting moral concern for farmed animals. Study 1 showed that presenting images of baby animals, versus adult animals, as the source of meat reduced appetite for meat, but this...

Disgust-sensitive individuals are particularly morally critical. Some theorists take this as evidence that disgust has a uniquely moral form: disgust contributes to moralization even of pathogen-free violations, and disgust’s contribution to moralization is unique from other emotional states. We argue that the relationship between disgust sensitivi...

How does information about agents' past violations influence people's expectations about their future actions? We examined this question, with a focus on the contrast between past harmful and past impure actions. Participants' judgments reflected two independent influences: action consistency and expectation asymmetry. An expectation asymmetry was...

Why are many Westerners outraged by dog meat, but comfortable with pork? This is particularly puzzling, given strong evidence that both species are highly intelligent. We suggest that although people consider intelligence a key factor in determining animals’ moral status, they disregard this information when it is self-relevant. In Study 1, we show...

Morality, sociability, and competence are distinct dimensions in person perception. We argue that a person’s morality informs us about their likely intentions, whereas their competence and sociability inform us about the likelihood that they will fulfill those intentions. Accordingly, we hypothesized that whereas morality would be considered uncond...

Religion and morality have been deeply interwoven throughout human history. Although much research has investigated the role of religiosity (e.g., belief in God, prayer, religious attendance) in shaping moral concerns, only recently has research in psychology begun to delve deeper into the meta-ethical beliefs theists hold about the spiritual found...

It is clear that harmful agents are targets of severe condemnation, but it is much less clear how perceivers conceptualize the agency of harmful agents. The current studies tested two competing predictions made by moral typecasting theory and the dehumanization literature. Across six studies, harmful agents were perceived to possess less agency tha...

Do people think that local authorities can change the immorality of harmful actions, like a man physically abusing his wife? Do people think that the immorality of harmful actions can be changed if they occur in another time or place? Our re-analysis of Fessler et al.’s multi-site cross-cultural study suggests that people overwhelmingly think that...

Human interactions are changing in far-reaching ways due to recent developments in Internet and mobile communication technologies, including widespread uptake of Facebook and other online social networks. Cyberpsychology, the study of computer-mediated communication and Internet behavior, is a rapidly developing field that has largely gone unnotice...

Recent theorizing suggests the 4Ns-that is, the belief that eating meat is natural, normal, necessary, and nice-are common rationalizations people use to defend their choice of eating meat. However, such theorizing has yet to be subjected to empirical testing. Six studies were conducted on the 4Ns. Studies 1a-1b demonstrated that the 4N classificat...

Religions have come to be intimately tied to morality, and much recent research has shown that theists and non-theists differ in their moral behavior and decision-making along several dimensions. Here we discuss how these empirical trends can be explained by fundamental differences in group commitment, motivations for prosociality, cognitive styles...

Four studies show that people distinguish between two sorts of moral virtues: core goodness traits that unconditionally enhance the morality of any agent, and value commitment traits that are conditionally good (i.e., that polarize the morality of good and bad agents). Study 1 revealed that commitment traits (e.g., dedicated) amplify the badness of...

Anger and disgust may have distinct roles in sexual morality; here, we tested hypotheses regarding the distinct foci, appraisals, and motivations of anger and disgust within the context of sexual offenses. We conducted four experiments in which we manipulated whether mutual consent (Studies 1-3) or desire (Study 4) was present or absent within a co...

Three studies demonstrated that the moral judgments of religious individuals and political conservatives are highly insensitive to consequentialist (i.e., outcome-based) considerations. In Study 1, both religiosity and political conservatism predicted a resistance toward consequentialist thinking concerning a range of transgressive acts, independen...

The Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scales (AHPS) are the methodological core of an influential perspective on pride. The Authentic Pride (AP) scale purportedly measures a distinct facet of pride rooted in attributing success to effort (but not ability), and related to prestige (but not dominance). The Hubristic Pride (HP) scale purportedly measures...

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterisation of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are aut...

What sorts of trait information do people most care about when forming impressions of others? Recent research in social cognition suggests that "warmth," broadly construed, should be of prime importance in impression formation. Yet, some prior research suggests that information about others' specifically moral traits-their moral "character"-may be...

Recent research has shown that religious individuals are much more resistant to utilitarian modes of thinking than their less religious counterparts, but the reason for this is not clear. We propose that a meta-ethical belief that morality is rooted in inviolable divine commands (i.e., endorsement of Divine Command Theory) may help explain this fin...

Three studies tested the conditions under which people judge utilitarian harm to be authority dependent (i.e., whether its right or wrongness depends on the ruling of an authority). In Study 1, participants judged the right or wrongness of physical abuse when used as an interrogation method anticipated to yield useful information for preventing fut...

An increasingly influential perspective in the study of pride holds that there are two distinct facets characterized by distinct ways of appraising the causes of achievement. "Authentic Pride" has been characterized as attributing success to one's temporary effort, whereas "Hubristic Pride" purportedly attributes success to one's stable, innate abi...

The CAD model posits a mapping of contempt, anger, and disgust onto the moral codes of community, autonomy, and divinity, respectively. A recent study by Hutcherson and Gross posited moral disgust as the dominant other-condemning emotion across all three moral codes. However, the methodology used may have incidentally increased the relevance of dis...

Anger may be more responsive than disgust to mitigating circumstances in judgements of wrongdoing. We tested this hypothesis in two studies where we had participants envision circumstances that could serve to mitigate an otherwise wrongful act. In Study 1, participants provided moral judgements, and ratings of anger and disgust, to a number of tran...

Two experiments demonstrated that religiosity affects the way people resolve moral dilemmas. Participants were presented a series of immoral actions and were asked to justify the wrongness of the action by appealing to either the violation of a rule (rule-based argument) or the negative consequences resulting from the action (outcome-based argument...

Psychologists have long used the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA) as an instrument for empirically distinguishing between trait emotions of guilt and shame. Recent assessments of the internal structure of the TOSCA guilt scale suggest that it may not measure the experience of guilt, but rather motivation to make amends for personal wrongdoing....

We propose a coevolutionary model of secrecy and stigmatization. According to this model, secrecy functions to conceal potential fitness costs detected in oneself or one’s genetic kin. In three studies, we found that the content of participants’ distressing secrets overlapped significantly with three domains of social information that were importan...

An evolutionary psychological perspective has much to offer the study of Internet behavior. However, cyber-psychologists have hitherto neglected this rich theoretical tradition and evolutionary psychologists have been slow to apply their perspective to computer-mediated behavior. This paper applies an evolutionary perspective to the study of Intern...

In this article, we discuss the range of concerns people weigh when evaluating the acceptability of harmful actions and propose a new perspective on the relationship between harm and morality. With this aim, we examine Kelly, Stich, Haley, Eng and Fessler's [Kelly, D., Stich, S., Haley, K., Eng, S., & Fessler, D. (2007). Harm, affect, and the moral...

Previous studies investigating altruistic punishment have confounded the effects of two independent variables: information transmission (or breach of privacy) and personal identification (or breach of anonymity). Here we report findings from a brief study in which participants were asked to respond to a social norm violation (i.e., an anonymous act...

In the present study, a modified dictator game was used to test the hypothesis that the threat of gossip would encourage prosocial decision making. All participants were asked to distribute an endowment between themselves and an anonymous second party. Half of the participants were told that the second party would be discussing their economic decis...

Language is a uniquely human behaviour, which has presented unique adaptive problems. Prominent among these is the transmission of information that may affect an individual’s reputation. The possibility of punishment of those with a low reputation by absent third parties has created a selective pressure on human beings that is not shared by any oth...