The role of moral disengagement and animal empathy in the meat paradox

Current levels of meat consumption are environmentally unsustainable and cause suffering to billions of animals each year. Researchers have sought to understand the psychological mechanisms driving people's meat consumption. Research suggests that having empathy towards animals may reduce a person's meat consumption, however, an empathic response does not always result in action (The “meat paradox”). It may be that some people ‘disengage’ from...