Dissociating meat from its animal origins: A systematic literature review

The paper, in plain language

Taking stock of a young field

After our experiments showed that presentation and language change willingness to eat meat, the question was whether the pattern held across the literature. Nora Benningstad and I searched three databases systematically and found 33 studies in 21 publications — qualitative, correlational and experimental — most of them published in just the few years before the review. Every study supported a central role for dissociation.

Two conclusions, one gap

The evidence converges on two points: cues that interrupt or ease dissociation change the dissonance meat eaters feel — reminders of the animal raise disgust and empathy and lower willingness to eat, findings replicated from the United States to Ecuador — and eaters also perform dissociation actively, as a coping strategy. Everyday food culture does much of the work for them: processed presentation, hurried shopping, and a vocabulary of 'pork' and 'beef' that never says 'pig' or 'cow'. The gap we flagged most sharply: at the time of the review, no study had measured actual eating behaviour — the whole literature ran on self-reported intentions.

Why it matters

Reviews are the field's bookkeeping, and this one established both that the dissociation effect is real across methods and cultures, and where its evidence ends. The behavioural gap we identified is exactly what our subsequent work — a field-style study of daily reminders and a dedicated measurement scale — set out to close.