Meat and morality: Will people eat lab-grown meat? With Matti Wilks, PhD, and Daniel Rosenfeld, PhD

Advocates of cultured meat say that it could help solve many environmental and animal welfare problems. But psychologists have found that some consumers say they’d be reluctant to try it. Matti Wilks, PhD, and Daniel Rosenfeld, PhD, discuss the psychological factors at play when people consider eating lab-grown meat -- and meat in general -- and how moral values, disgust, and other factors contribute to people’s dietary choices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:42Kim Mills?

  Would you eat meat grown in a lab? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture have given the go-ahead for cultured meat to be sold in the U.S., although it's not yet available in stores. Advocates of cultured meat say that it could help address the environmental and animal welfare concerns that come with meeting the public's desire for chicken, burgers, and steak. But not everyone is convinced. In March, Mississippi became the third state to outlaw the sale of cultured meat, joining Florida and Alabama. And beyond the legal threats, researchers have found that a significant portion of consumers say they would just be reluctant to try it. Today, we're going to talk to two psychologists about why that is.

• 1:24Kim Mills?

  What are the psychological factors at play when people consider eating lab-grown meat or meat in general? How do moral values, disgust, and other psychological factors contribute to people's dietary choices? And could lab-grown meat become a viable part of most consumers' diet in the future? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

• 1:58Kim Mills?

  I have two guests today. First is Dr. Maddie Wilks, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She has studied people's attitudes toward cultured meat and what's called the "natural is better" bias. More broadly, she's interested in people's moral motivations and choices, including children's moral development, people's concern for animals, and unusually altruistic people. Dr. Wilks' work has been covered by Scientific American, New Scientists, and other publications. Also with us today is Dr. Daniel Rosenfeld, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research centers on eating behavior with a particular focus on the psychology of vegetarianism, as well

• 2:40Kim Mills?

  as attitudes toward cultured meat. He's published dozens of scientific articles and his work has been covered by media outlets including NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and WebMD. Dr. Wilks, Dr. Rosenfeld, thank you for joining me today. Thank you very much for having me.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Happy to be here.

• 2:57Kim Mills?

  Let's start by explaining what cultured meat is. How is it different from conventional meat and plant-based meat substitutes?

• 3:06Speaker 04

  So, conventional meat is the most prototypical kind of meat when you think about meat. That's when you raise an animal and at a certain point you slaughter it and you consume its flesh as meat. Plant-based meats are using plants, so that could be vegetables, or beans, or lentils, or grains, or tofu, and essentially creating a product that mirrors the taste and texture of meat to some degree, and is using plants to create a meat-like product or a meat analog. And that's a typical veggie burger, or something like the Impossible Burger or Beyond Burger.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Then cultured meat or cultivated meat is its own category. It's different than the other two where you're taking a part of an animal cell. So say a biopsy from an animal, a living animal, and you grow the animal's cells or tissues into a more advanced form of what that cell could grow into. So you create meat from that cell. You make the cell grow and grow and grow until it is a literal animal tissue there that mirrors real animal flesh. So you're creating, quote unquote, real meat.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  Meat that is from an animal, from a sampling of the animal's tissue, rather than slaughtering the entire animal to get that meat from them.

• 4:47Kim Mills?

  Not to get too deep into the weeds here, but does it matter from which part of the animal you take the cells? So if you're looking for filet mignon or a rump steak, does it matter where on the animal you take the cells from?

• 5:01Speaker 05

  So to my understanding, all cultured meat is primarily developed through stem cells. But I couldn't tell you about the specifics of whether, yeah, whether you need certain elements of that to create certain parts of certain kinds of meat. That's a really interesting question.

• 5:17Kim Mills?

  To establish your bona fides, I would like to know for certain. You have both eaten cultured meat, right?

• 5:22Speaker 05

  I have not. I really want to, and it's not been available to me yet. Very, it's, yeah, very sad.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  And I have a different answer to that. I have not eaten cultured meat. And if it were available to me, I personally would not eat it. But I hope that other people do.

• 5:38Kim Mills?

  That's interesting. So I guess it's hard for you to answer the question then as to whether it tastes like conventionally produced meat. Does it look like it? I mean, I'm sure you've seen images.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, from what I've seen, you know, which is mostly on media and online because you haven't seen it in real life or I would have tried it. Um, yeah, it seems exactly the same. It tends to be at the moment sort of chicken nuggets and more processed type meat products, um, rather than things like steaks, although there are some companies that'll produce, for example, a cultured steak. Um, but yeah, it looks the same to me. I've spoken to people who have tried it and they've said, you know, it tastes the same to them.

• 6:15Kim Mills?

  Dr. Rosenfeld?

• 6:17Speaker 04

  Yes, from what I have read online and heard talking to people, it seems that it really mirrors the taste and texture of conventional meat very well. And as Dr. Wolf said, I know that there are differences in the kinds of meat that are easier versus harder to make and are available. So more ground up meat like chicken nuggets or prepped ground beef seem to be more feasible, whereas things like steak just have really complex tissues and mirroring an actual bone and how the fibrous meat attaches to the bone and has the marbleized fat. And it's just a more complex thing to make. So that would be a little later on into the mass market.

• 6:59Kim Mills?

  Now, you've both done research on consumers' attitudes toward cultured meat. Broadly, what have you found? Do many consumers say that they'd be willing to try it? Or is there a lot of hesitation?

• 7:11Speaker 05

  The first study I conducted on cultured meat, which was a long, long time ago, we got around 65% of the samples, about two thirds of the samples, saying that they would try cultured meat, but then about a third saying that they would eat it regularly. So there was like enthusiasm, people were interested, but people kind of felt a bit reluctant to commit more heavily. Now, my work has roughly replicated that, and I'm pretty sure that's roughly on track with what other people find. But I know Daniel recently published a big TIC paper, kind of looking at the psychology of cultured meat, or a trans-in cognitive science paper, looking at the psychology of cultured meat. And I don't know, is that what kind of came out in your review, Daniel?

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it seems that the majority of people are at least interested in trying cultured meat. And as Matty just referenced there, there's a difference between being willing to try it versus intending to make it a regular staple of your diet. So a lot of people would say something like, I'm open to trying it, tasting it. But probably after that, they'll just maybe go back to eating their regular conventional meat, whereas other people might say, I do want to try it and I do want to adopt it into my diet and replace conventional meat with it. That seems to be, I would sense a more split of, and even split the people who are willing

• 8:27Speaker 04

  to really go full on, adopt it versus just taste it as a sort of novelty product. So there are different motivations why somebody might want to just try it. And I believe there is work showing that people who seek novelty are open to new experiences and really enjoy being a foodie, might want to try cultured meat because it's an exciting, new, innovative, cool product, just like eating at the new restaurant down the street. Other people have different motivations wanting to try it. People who appreciate the value of it as being something that could reduce animal suffering or help the environment, they're the ones who are more willing to say integrate it into their diet longer term.

• 9:09Speaker 05

  We also find, very briefly, like there are a group of, there also tend to be a small sample, or some more subset of samples that feel very negatively towards it as well. So I have research, for example, where we find that, you know, 20% or so of some samples will say things like cultured meat would be wrong, no matter how small the risk and how great the benefit. So it's this very strong, absolute, almost moral opposition to cultured meat as well, which tends to be a much smaller portion of the population, but not nobody.

• 9:36Kim Mills?

  It's interesting that there would be a moral objection because we already know how meat is currently produced and it's not pretty. Whereas if we were to make meat in a lab, I mean, nobody has to die for this to happen. So where's the disconnect psychologically in people's brains? Why don't they see this?

• 9:56Speaker 05

  That's a really big question. So while people can, generally people can see the environmental and animal welfare benefits of meat, of cultured meat, over and above the way that factory farmed meat is produced. But there's sort of another element to the moral judgment that I think people are making, which ties into this notion of unnaturalness. And so often when you ask people, you know, what do you think about cultured meat? The negative things that come up, there's a whole range, but one that's very common is The idea that cultured meat is unnatural or disgusting and these two things kind of play, like ply in together. And I think that for some people, that moralization comes from that belief that cultured meat is unnatural. But so in qualitative type interviews, you hear people saying things like, we shouldn't be playing God. We shouldn't be creating Frankenmeat. And so it feels like a violation of nature to create meat without an animal.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  And I think that's the moralized view.

• 10:43Kim Mills?

  Dr. Rosenfeld, you hear the same things?

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Yes, um, yeah, I think that the moralized part is is really largely due to that perception that it's a violation of like moral purity and just the natural order. I think a lot of that also can tie into religiosity and views about the natureness that that God would prescribe to humans to follow a set of sacred principles and not violate the natural order. I also think that some of the moral part, maybe to a lesser degree, because this is less of a moral instinct and more of a higher level of moral reasoning, is the concerns about cultured meats and an industry around it

• 11:30Speaker 04

  displacing traditional agricultural workers and industries. And so economically, if cultured meat were to become very mainstream, there were to be a, there would be a change in the labor force of what jobs people are working in the agricultural sector. And so I'm not an economist. I don't know exactly how that would play out, but I know that consumers as just people have concerns about economically how that would play out. Perhaps especially consumers who live in more rural conservative areas where the economy is and people that they know and care about have livelihoods attached to traditional meat production.

• 12:14Kim Mills?

  And I'm not an economist either, but I think we've seen this happen many times. You know, the fact that we don't have corner bookshops anymore because of Amazon, or that taxicab drivers have been displaced by Lyft and Uber. You know, the marketplace does change, but that's not to make a judgment here. You know, we recently did an episode with Dr. Paul Rosin from the University of Pennsylvania, who is one of the foremost experts on disgust. And meat is one of those things that many people just generally find disgusting. I mean, and is that an overarching theme as you are talking to people about cultivated meat? Is it just a general feeling of disgust toward meat that drives people to say, I don't want to try it?

• 12:58Speaker 05

  First of all, I loved the interview with Paul Rosin. It was wonderful. I don't think that we have a solid answer to that question. So my sense is that there might be kind of two. The concept of disgust is quite complicated. So you have things like your physical disgust, so you know, something is spoiled, or you know, the physical side of disgust that we have in reaction to feces, to bad meat, things like that. But then there's also this element of moral disgust. And moral disgust is sort of more something that you kind of see with outrage, where people have done something that you think of as morally wrong, and you report feeling morally disgusted by them.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  I don't know if we have a good sense of whether cultured attitudes towards cultured meat that are around disgust would fall into the physical disgust or of the more moral disgust. But perhaps, I just don't know the whack. Daniel, is there anything out there that I'm missing?

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, so what Maddie says is a great point. And there, with disgust, it's such a complicated emotion, especially to study and measure because of the way we use the word. We use words to describe emotions and feelings, and there can be a disconnect between the semantics, the labeling, versus the actual embodiment or inner psychological phenomenon. So there is work that I've done that can speak to this question indirectly, where I found in some work that if you look at whether people are vegetarian versus meat eaters, interestingly, vegetarians are a lot more...

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Averse to trying cultured meat. You would think vegetarians might be like, this is great. This aligns with my values. And maybe you think that they miss meat and they want an alternative that's not made from animals. What I found was that vegetarians are a lot less interested in trying cultured meat compared to meat eaters. And in my work, I found that this is really due presumably to vegetarians being more disgusted by cultured meat. So vegetarians are a lot more grossed out by cultured meat than meat eaters. And that to me speaks a lot to more of the physical disgust explanation because vegetarians would have moral opposition to meat.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  And that would lead to moral disgust. Meat eaters don't really have physical disgust at meat because they enjoy it and they like it and they eat it a lot. Vegetarians have, a lot of them, a strong physical disgust toward meat. And that seems to be really lining up with this finding that they're not interested in trying it. I think it's just because vegetarians, whether they're really motivated by animal rights and in their mind, the idea of just meat is this part of an animal and they can't get it out of their head. Or just that they haven't eaten meat in many years and they lose the taste for it. And in their mind, it's no longer a food object. For whatever reason, it seems to have that same meaning, whether it's conventional meat or cultured meat.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  To a lot of vegetarians, meat is just meat and they don't want to eat it.

• 16:02Speaker 00

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• 16:15Speaker 01

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 16:44Kim Mills?

  What is keeping cultured meat from being sold to consumers in the US other than the handful of state laws that I mentioned earlier that are prohibiting it? Is it that the producers are realizing that the public sentiment is not in their favor? Or is it something else?

• 17:03Speaker 05

  So my understanding of this is relatively limited. But having, from what I do understand, there is a bit of an issue with scalability. So, you know, producing cultured meat is expensive. It's a very specific process that needs to be under the right conditions. So I've heard about several different plants that were, you know, there to be being built basically to produce cultured meat at scale. And a couple of times we've had claims from different companies that cultured meat will be on the shelves by next year, I think like 2021, for example. And although there are some places, I think in restaurants in the States where you can buy it, it doesn't seem like that that's really been delivered. And so my understanding is there are some issues with scalability and also price. At the moment, it's very expensive to produce and so you're going to be selling at a loss, which isn't, not an economist either, but it seems like not a very economically viable model.

• 17:47Speaker 05

  So that's my understanding. From my sense, there's not really a lot of concern about consumer attitudes that would prevent it from being produced because there is also a lot of support out there. And I think the people producing this really do care about the product and the benefits that it can bring to the world. So I don't think that consumer attitudes are what's getting in the way.

• 18:06Kim Mills?

  Let's talk about those benefits. What are the upsides to cultured meat?

• 18:11Speaker 04

  I think the biggest upside to cultured meat, because all of the upsides have opposing viewpoints you could debate, a lot of those are just philosophical and other ones can be answered with a lot of data and estimation. But one that I think is the clearest is just reducing animal suffering. So conventional meat takes a lot of animal slaughter to create and cultured meat does not take a lot of animal slaughter. In fact, it wouldn't really take any animal slaughter. And so I would say the biggest benefit is reducing animal suffering and reducing animal slaughter. The other benefits, I do believe, can be quite debated as far as how it will be produced

• 18:54Speaker 04

  and nuances. So one benefit is a better environmental impact and conventional meat takes just so much water, land and greenhouse gas emissions to create and it's very damaging for the environment, the way we produce it. Theoretically, culture meat is incredibly more sustainable. It takes a lot fewer resources to produce. Now, I'm not an expert in the environmental science of it, but I have heard that especially before scaling up production, it can be quite energy intensive to create smaller batch culture meat. And so I'm not sure of the details of what exact energy is used in that, but I do know that it's

• 19:36Speaker 04

  not a surefire claim yet to say it's incredibly more environmentally friendly. I think that it will be at a certain point and it has the incredible potential to be a lot more environmentally friendly. It's a matter of scaling that up in a thoughtful way and knowing how to execute that. And then the third benefit could be that it could be healthier. So it is still meat. So whatever health benefits or detrimental meat comes with, culture meat will pretty much mirror those. It's the same chemically and physically for you. But a big difference is that it could be cleaner than conventional meat. So conventional meat,

• 20:15Speaker 04

  you need a lot of antibiotics and pollutants that get into the environment that animals for months, years of their life, just like humans, are exposed to a lot of toxins and antibiotics and disease and accumulate this in their body and then we consume that. Culture meat can be created in a much more sanitary, controlled environment. And so you could prevent the meat from being exposed to a lot of these pollutants and that could on a grand scale have a big health benefit. And then another issue is that raising animals

• 20:52Speaker 04

  for livestock and for meat is a threat to pandemics and to creating these diseases that spread between animal to animal, animal to human and vice versa. So when we have billions of farmed animals to trillions, just Existing and breathing and interacting with each other and us, we are increasing the risk of future pandemics like COVID outbursting. And so cultured meat could be a good way to reduce that risk as well, to have zoonic diseases go on the dip.

• 21:25Kim Mills?

  Right. And of course, we're dealing with a bird flu problem right now. So cultured meat could help obviate that that kind of a problem. Well, Dr. Wilkes, I want to talk to you a little bit more about the moral values and people's attitudes. Do these attitudes vary by country or culture? Has research looked into that question?

• 21:46Speaker 05

  So there has been some cross-cultural work. I actually recently reviewed this. And if you look at, there was a like a scoping review done, and most of this work is still, you know, US, UK, Netherlands based. And so we can't make very strong claims, in my view, about cross-cultural attitudes. But there's been a few studies that have compared across countries. And for example, one study that I think included 10 different countries around Europe, found that people in France tended to have more negative attitudes. Some work has found, for example, that participants in China have more positive attitudes, but then other work has found more negative attitudes. So it seems to be variable, but because we've got so many different kinds of questions being asked in different contexts for the surveys, I don't think we can make a strong claim about, you know, which countries are pro or against cultured meat at this point.

• 22:27Kim Mills?

  Given what we know about the psychological factors at play, what are some of the ways that consumers might be encouraged to try cultured meat?

• 22:36Speaker 05

  One thing that comes up for me a lot is if you think about the benefits. So Daniel mentioned the benefits of cultured meat before. And when you survey people, that's what consumers see as well. So they see that it's good for the environment, it's good for animals, it's good for, from a zoonosis standpoint. But a lot of these benefits that people see are kind of distal to them. So it's not something that's going to affect them day to day. Whereas the things that are very relevant to them are things like how much it costs, how it tastes, whether it's healthy, whether it's safe. And so I think that we need to meet consumers where their values are. So while everybody does care about animal suffering in the environment to some degree, the thing that people are thinking about when they're in the supermarket is how much does this cost? How much does, like, what does this taste like? Is this going to be something that I can cook and I feel familiar with?

• 23:18Speaker 05

  And so if we can try to appeal to people at their level or in line with their own values or moral beliefs about cultured meat, I think that's going to be a more compelling way to get people on board than trying to just sort of tell them, well, it's good for the environment, it's good for animals, so therefore you should care about this.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  That's right. Matty raises a million points there. And I think an analogy that just came to mind was like, why do people, at least in the US, eat so much fast food like McDonald's and Burger King? It's not because they're concerned about the ethics or the environment or the health. It's just price, taste and convenience. And so I think that culture meat, if it has a good price point and tastes the same as conventional meat, those are two fundamentals that are non-negotiables for consumers. And then in addition to that, I think two other really big factors are, is it convenient and is it socially normal? So people don't want to go out of their way to prepare food that's difficult or not readily available down the street.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  And it has to be convenient. It has to fit within their schedule and not take any extra work to get it into their diet compared to any other fast food or meal they might eat in a given day. And then it has to be socially normal in that people are really swayed by the desire to conform and to do what their friends and family and coworkers do. And they really don't want to stand out from the crowd, especially with food. People really want to just do what other people do on a subconscious level. Because when something is socially normal, especially a kind of food you consume,

• 24:59Speaker 04

  what it's saying to our mind on a very basic level is that this food is safe, trustworthy, probably tastes good, probably won't kill me or give me any disease in the coming decades at least. And I'll also gain some degree of acceptance and respect from my friends and family who see me eating it like them. It's just a way to fit in with the group and and it's a good heuristic to know that this food's all right to eat. So it's gotta make its way into society and not be seen as this different thing.

• 25:37Kim Mills?

  There's a lot of debate going on right now about highly-processed foods and people becoming more aware of how much processed food we do eat today. Is cultured meat, would it be considered a highly-processed food in the same sense that most of us think of that term?

• 25:53Speaker 05

  So my understanding is that this is a big narrative that's being pushed by people who are opposing cultured meat, so there's been quite a bit of pushback on the cultured and plant-based meat industry about this being something that is ultra-processed. And to my knowledge, and I'm not an expert on what classifies something as ultra-processed, but cultured meat doesn't meet that standard, so I don't think so. Though whether or not people believe that it is ultra-processed is a different question, of course.

• 26:18Kim Mills?

  Of course. How did you both become interested in studying this topic? I think you both came to it from somewhat different research backgrounds. Dr. Rosenfeld, maybe you want to take that one first?

• 26:29Speaker 04

  I originally got into studying psychology just because I was both very interested in just how people think and behave and feel as humans. And that naturally was drew me to studying psychology at a basic level. And then separately from that, I've always been very interested in food and nutrition and health. And so about 10 years ago, I decided personally, while I was studying, in my early stages of studying psychology, I decided to go vegan. And at first, I did not think this was a big deal. It was like, what I eat is what I eat, and who else cares besides me? It just affects me and my body. And so I went vegan, and I was like to friends, like, yeah, by the way, I'm vegan now, family,

• 27:14Speaker 04

  by the way, I'm vegan. I thought the conversation would go something like, hey, I'm vegan. Oh, cool, Dan, that's good for you. All right, let's go out and hang out. And it went something more like, why are you vegan? What the heck? And it was this massive deal. And I suddenly had to defend why I eat the way I do. And it was really forced upon me to become this defining thing of who I was. It was like, he is the vegan now. And I had no intention of making this a part of my life at all, but society and the culture just told me every day, you are now different. And this is some significant thing about who you are that says something about...

• 28:00Speaker 04

  Your masculinity, your moral beliefs, probably your political beliefs and what kind of car you might drive and so many other stereotypes and stigmas that came with that. And so I was interested in taking my interest in psychology and my experiences of being vegan to say, what is going on here with the way people think about veganism and vegetarianism and just meat as this thing that has such significance for who you are and what you believe in terms of whether you eat it or not. So that's how I got interested in studying the psychology of veganism and meat and then ultimately cultured meat and doing this kind of work. Dr. Wilkes, what about you?

• 28:42Speaker 05

  A slightly different path. So I was actually raised vegetarian. So my parents are vegetarian. I grew up as a vegetarian and by like, and they gave me the choice when I was about 10 to continue to be or not. And I chose to be. And then it kind of wasn't a major part of my life. It was just something that had always been. But I'd always been very upset about the impact of factory farming. It was something I'd always really cared about. In a completely separate part of my life, I'd started studying psychology and I was actually working on kind of social learning in children and chimpanzees. So I was working on human and animal cognition, how do humans differ from other animals? And then I went into a PhD starting to work on children's moral judgment. So it was a sort of a slow progress. I was interested in morality and human animal interactions

• 29:25Speaker 05

  and things like that. And around about a year or so before I started my PhD, I remember reading about, you know, cultured meat being unveiled in London. It was this big thing. And I thought to myself, wow, this is the first thing I can see, which actually could help everybody to give up factory farmed meat, because I had kind of come to the conclusion that you probably weren't going to convince everybody to stop eating meat. And so I thought this was extremely cool. And I spent about two or three years asking everybody I knew, like, would you eat cultured meat? And just being, you know, quite obnoxious about it, really. And then during my PhD, it occurred to me, like, I'm a scientist and I'm a psychologist. I can actually do research on this. And so I just set out and was like, I'm going to try and do some work. And there was no psychological research on it at the time. So it was quite a scary undertaking, but I'm really glad I did.

• 30:10Kim Mills?

  I'm just wondering, I know, Dr. Rosenfeld, you've looked at gender differences in meat consumptions and as you've looked at attitudes toward eating. I'm just wondering what you have found.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  So, there's a long history of gender in being related to just our agricultural system and the foods that we eat. And I think of all the foods, meat might be the most gendered of all the foods. And what I've found there basically is a couple of findings that just summarize the work. One is that men just seem to like meat more than women. And the idea of giving up meat is a lot scarier and more daunting to men than women. And men eat more meat, they eat meat more frequently and they eat larger servings of meat. And this holds true for all kinds of meat. It holds true for beef, for pork, for chicken,

• 31:03Speaker 04

  for fish. So, across the board, men just like meat more than women. There's also an attitude that men hold toward meat that really aligns with this is that men don't think meat is as bad for the environment as women do. Men think meat is healthier than women. And also, if you ask men and women, they will say that they do associate meat with masculinity and manhood. And the idea of a man not eating meat seems to just irritate people. It's more of a gender role violation from what you expect. It seems to just irritate

• 31:46Speaker 04

  people more than the idea of a woman not eating meat. And so, those are the main findings I've found here. Just this link between meats and masculinity that crickles down into people's behaviors and thoughts and desires and concerns and fears.

• 32:01Kim Mills?

  So what's next for for you both? Dr. Wilkes, what are you working on? Are you still deep in in the whole cultured meat research?

• 32:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I'm still doing a bit of work on cultured meat. My most recent work has been looking at things like the moral foundations that underpin people's attitudes. So we did some work where we found that, um, so if you look at the narrative around cultured meat, it's all about harm reduction, which is what we're talking about before. It's good for the environment, good for animals, things like that. So we expected that people who cared more about harm would have more positive attitudes to cultured meat, and people who cared more about purity would have more negative attitudes. And we found evidence to support the second thing. So people who have high purity concerns are more likely to oppose cultured meat. But we found no link between people's attitudes, um, on people's attitudes towards harm and how they feel about cultured meat, which was really surprising. And we've done this across a couple of samples. So I'm interested in trying to extend that a little bit further, understand more about the kind of moral values that underpin people's

• 32:54Speaker 05

  attitudes. Um, but I also do, so as you mentioned, I work across a whole range of topics. So I'm I'm really interested in this idea of the moral circle. So that is a way to describe who we do and don't think of as worthy of moral concern. Beings that are closer to the centre of your moral circle are granted more moral concern, and those that are closer to the edges are granted less. Uh, and this concept's been around in philosophy for a long time, but more recently, we've seen a lot of psychological work trying to describe and understand our moral circles. And I'm really interested in sort of understanding individual variability here. So why some people care really widely about a whole range of different beings, uh, and some people care in a more contracted way, so they focus their energy on their friends and family. And I'm particularly interested in the moral concern that we feel for distant beings. So why do some people care about animals

• 33:35Speaker 05

  or people, um, in other countries who live far away, or potentially, um, nature and the environment, things like that. So understanding what drives people to care about these distant others is something that I'm I'm really excited to explore. And I'm also doing a little bit of work trying to understand what we actually mean when we talk about moral concern. So it's easy to say, you know, do you feel moral concern for a person or a pig or, you know, all these different categories? But what do we actually mean when we're talking about moral concern? What sentiment are we capturing there?

• 34:04Kim Mills?

  Dr. Rosenfeld, what's up for you?

• 34:06Speaker 04

  So at its heart, I like food psychology and thinking about people's eating behaviors. And so I am interested in how people think about cultured meat compared to other comparable novelty or outlier foods categories that also have benefits, whether it's for health or the environment or animals. So one analogy would be things like eating at a farmer's market, or eating local, or eating organic, or avoiding GMO. There are just a lot of other examples throughout history and now where we've seen these movements evolve and become more normalized or not.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  And just understanding like, what are the parallels between cultured meat and these other movements? But then also, what are the differences?

• 34:56Kim Mills?

  Dr. Wilkes, Dr. Rosenfeld, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills. Kim Mills.

• 36:17Speaker 00

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