Health, environmental, and animal rights motives for vegetarian eating.

Christopher J Hopwood,Wiebke Bleidorn,Ted Schwaba,Sophia Chen,Valerio Capraro

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0230609

Abstract

Health, the environment, and animal rights represent the three main reasons people cite for vegetarian diet in Western societies. However, it has not been shown that these motives can be distinguished empirically, and little is known about what kind of people are likely to be compelled by these different motives. This study had three goals. First, we aimed to use construct validation to test whether develop health, environmental, and animal rights motives for a vegetarian diet could be distinguished. Second, we evaluated whether these motivations were associated with different demographic, behavioral, and personality profiles in three diverse samples. Third, we examined whether peoples' motivations were related to responses to vegetarian advocacy materials. We created the Vegetarian Eating Motives Inventory, a 15-item measure whose structure was invariant across three samples (N = 1006, 1004, 5478) and two languages (English and Dutch). Using this measure, we found that health was the most common motive for non-vegetarians to consider vegetarian diets and it had the broadest array of correlates, which primarily involved communal and agentic values. Correlates of environmental and animal rights motives were limited, but these motives were strong and specific predictors of advocacy materials in a fourth sample (N = 739). These results provide researchers with a useful tool for identifying vegetarian motives among both vegetarian and non-vegetarian respondents, offer useful insights into the nomological net of vegetarian motivations, and provide advocates with guidance about how to best target campaigns promoting a vegetarian diet.

Highlights

Health, environment, and animal rights appear to represent the primary non-religious motives for a plant-based diet [1,20,21,22,23,24]
The motivational complexity of vegetarian behavior implies that advocacy will generally be most effective if it targets the specific motives of its audience. This is presumably why advocacy groups tend to campaign on one of the three main reasons to adopt plant-based diets—health, the environment, and animal rights. Is it true that people with different levels of health, environmental, and animal rights motives will be differentially sensitive to advocacy materials that target their primary motives? The third goal of this project was to use the measure we developed to determine whether individual differences in motives for vegetarian eating predict responsiveness to advocacy materials that focus on health, the environment, or animal rights
Environmental, and animal rights motives for vegetarian eating interpreting effects that were only present due to statistical suppression, we examined the bivariate correlations for each replicated motive-criterion association in the first two samples and discarded the cases in which the regression coefficient and bivariate correlation were of opposite signs or in which the bivariate correlation was < |.15|

Summary

Introduction

Environment, and animal rights appear to represent the primary non-religious motives for a plant-based diet [1,20,21,22,23,24]. Far there is very little evidence that these motives can be distinguished empirically, and no existing measures of eating behavior is available to measure health, environment, and animal rights as distinct motives for vegetarian diet. One consequence of this gap in the literature is that relatively little is known about th

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