Judgemental: social attitudes towards vegetarians
As you may remember from our Judgemental episode we interviewed Dr. Julia Minson at the Wharton School about her research on “Do Gooder Derogation” – the phenomenon of people thinking worse of those who are behaving morally or prosocially (PDF of the Minson and Monin paper).
Listen to my full extended interview with her (she laughs endearingly like Marge Simpson doesn’t she?):
(23min) (download or play MP3 24MB) (other formats)
Some of you might be questioning the whole premise saying to yourself “hey, do people really think that vegetarians are doing good?”. But that is what Julia found.
Even though people tend to rate themselves as better than others, and (Dr Minson found) more moral than others, even meat-eaters rated vegetarians as more moral than average (i.e. other) meat-eaters.