Here, eating preferences represent a fascinating example as these may not qualify as an ideological battlefield per se but nonetheless are of political relevance in times of climate change (McMichael, Powles, Butler, & Uauy, 2007). Ideological threads seem to not only connect political preferences (even when these seem to be logically incompatible), but they also extend to the realm of individual lifestyles (Allen & Ng, 2003 Allen, Wilson, Ng, & Dunne, 2000 Carney, Jost, Gosling, & Potter, 2008 Dhont & Hodson, 2014 Dhont, Hodson, & Leite, 2016 Dhont, Hodson, Costello, & MacInnis, 2014 Dietz, Frisch, Kalo, Stern, & Guagnano, 1995 Hyers, 2006 Ruby, 2012). Connecting our results to prior work on the explanatory power of moral foundations for the political polarization of environmentalism, we discuss how our results may inform inter-ideologically appealing communications of reducing meat consumption, which is a worthwhile and necessary goal for mitigating climate change.
Mediation analyses reveal that substantive parts of the association between political orientation and self-restriction in eating are attributable to differences in the moral makeup of left- and right-wing adherents. Specifically, the binding foundations authority and purity as well as avoidance tendencies are shown to differentially interact with meat-eating across the political spectrum with stronger effects for left-wing adherents and centrists than for the right-wing. Here, we expand on these findings by showing the moral foundations to connect political orientation and vegan and vegetarian eating preferences as well as specific strategies of meat-eating justification in a large German sample. Moral foundations have been shown to explain why even seemingly contradictory issue stances are brought forward in the context of the same ideological or political orientation. right-wing political orientation and self-restrictive vs. Instead, common psychological factors may predispose people toward both: left vs. Logical contradictions and historical counter-examples cast doubt on a substantive connection between political orientation and meat-eating. Though meat-consumption is known to be a key factor in environmental damage, veganism and vegetarianism are still perceived to be left-wing-phenomena, ironically not penetrating to those who hold ideologies of conservation.
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