Source: Michael Fielding, MEATINGPLACE, 8/25/16

Our beliefs about how farm ani¬mals are raised can shape our meat-eating expe¬ri¬ence, according to a new study led by Lisa Feldman Bar¬rett, Uni¬ver¬sity Dis¬tin¬guished Pro¬fessor of Psy¬chology at North¬eastern University.

For the study, researchers paired iden¬tical meat sam¬ples with dif¬ferent descrip¬tions and then reported on par¬tic¬i¬pants’ eating expe¬ri¬ences. They found that meat sam¬ples paired with descrip¬tions of ani¬mals raised on conventional farms looked, smelled and tasted less pleasant to study par¬tic¬i-pants than meat sam¬ples paired with descrip¬tions of ani¬mals raised on humane farms. Par¬tic¬i¬pants’ beliefs also influ¬enced their per¬ceived flavor of the meat and the amount of meat they con¬sumed, sug¬gesting that beliefs can actu¬ally influ¬ence eating behavior.

The find¬ings, pub¬lished Wednesday in the sci¬en¬tific journal PLoS ONE, align with an emerging body of research that shows that our beliefs can influ¬ence how we eval¬uate food.

“We show that what you feel very directly influ¬ences not only how you inter¬pret what you see but also very lit¬er¬ally what you see,” said Bar¬rett, director of Northeastern’s Inter¬dis¬ci¬pli¬nary Affec¬tive Sci¬ence Lab¬o¬ra¬tory. “We call this 'affec¬tive realism’ — the ten¬dency of your feel¬ings to influ¬ence the actual con¬tent of your per¬cep¬tual expe¬ri¬ence.”
The find¬ings, she said, sug¬gest that anyone inter¬ested in cre¬ating things, from a chef to a film¬maker to a designer, “should con¬sider how beliefs influ¬ence the user experience.”

To test their hypoth¬esis, the researchers designed three dif¬ferent exper¬i¬ments.

For the first exper¬i¬ment, study par¬tic¬i¬pants were asked to con¬sume two iden¬tical sam¬ples of organic beef jerky, each of which was paired with a dif¬ferent label describing a dif¬ferent kind of farm on which cows were raised. The “humane farm” label described a farm on which ani¬mals lived freely, grazing out¬doors. The “fac¬tory farm” label described a farm on which ani¬mals were con¬fined to indoor pens.

The researchers found that study par¬tic¬i¬pants ranked the conventionally farmed meat sample as less pleasant along all mea¬sured con¬sump¬tion cat¬e¬gories, including appear¬ance, smell, taste and overall enjoy¬ment.

Par¬tic¬i¬pants were willing to pay 22 per¬cent less for a six-ounce package of the “fac¬tory-farmed” jerky com¬pared to the “humanely farmed” jerky and con¬sumed 8 per¬cent less as well, showing, the researchers wrote, “that implicit con¬sump¬tion behavior was also influ¬enced by beliefs.”

“We were largely hypoth¬e¬sizing that labeling some¬thing as raised on a humane farm would improve taste and appear¬ance and other char¬ac¬ter¬is¬tics of the meat sample,” Bar¬rett said. “But what we found instead is that explic¬itly labeling some¬thing as fac¬tory farmed harms the per¬cep¬tual qual¬i¬ties of the food.”

Another exper¬i¬ment was sim¬ilar to the first, with a few key dif¬fer¬ences.

This time, each study par¬tic¬i¬pant sam¬pled only one of four iden¬tical roast beef sam¬ples, each of which was paired with a newly cre¬ated descrip¬tion. To test whether the "fac¬tory farm" label reduced enjoy¬ment or the "humane farm" label increased enjoy¬ment, they added a con¬trol descrip¬tion that did not men¬tion how the ani¬mals were raised.

They also revised the orig¬inal "fac¬tory farm" and "humane farm" descrip¬tions to focus on their dif-fer¬ences with respect to animal wel¬fare and added a so-called "fac¬tory farm+" descrip¬tion that high-lighted the advan¬tages of conventional farming to test whether it would offset the effects of perceived animal suffering.

The results showed that posi¬tioning conventional farms in a pos¬i¬tive light did not increase par¬tic¬i-pants’ enjoy¬ment of the sample, as meat paired with the "fac¬tory farm+" descrip¬tion was not more well-liked than the meat paired with the gen¬eral "fac¬tory farm" descrip¬tion.

This experiment’s other big finding — beef paired with the "humane farm" descrip¬tion and the con-trol descrip¬tion were equally liked — suggested that the "humane farm" descrip¬tion did not increase liking, but rather that the "fac¬tory farm" descrip¬tion reduced liking.

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