The effects of dissociation on willingness to eat meat are moderated by exposure to unprocessed meat: A cross-cultural demonstration

The paper, in plain language

Exporting the paradigm

My earlier experiments showed that interrupting dissociation — putting the animal back into the meat — raises disgust and empathy and lowers meat appetite, mostly in the US, where meat arrives skinless and boneless. With Carina Palacios Haugestad, I ran the head-on versus head-removed pork roast experiment in parallel in the US and Ecuador, where markets display carcasses and the whole-animal dish hornado is ordinary.

Culture moderates the mechanism's first stage

The head reminder increased disgust, empathy and vegetarian choice in both countries, but every effect was stronger in the US — and willingness to eat the meat dropped only among Americans. Measured exposure to unprocessed meat reproduced the country pattern, pointing at habituation rather than some other cultural difference. The model's architecture was telling: the paths from disgust and empathy to eating were equal across cultures; what differed was the front end — whether the reminder still disrupts dissociation at all. Willingness was self-reported, the samples were conveniences, and the Ecuadorian dissociation measure was less reliable — the usual honest print.

Why it matters

Meat-reduction campaigns built on animal reminders assume a consumer whose food system hides the animal. Where exposure is routine, the reminder has little left to interrupt — the affective machinery is universal, but the trigger is cultural. For intervention design that means know your audience's baseline; for theory it locates dissociation precisely: a coping mechanism produced by concealment, not a human constant. The study extends the dissociation line that runs through my food-psychology strand.