By: Julia
Shaw
Level of Difficulty: **
BEFORE YOU READ
QUESTIONS
1.
What conclusion
can we draw from the example of factory farmed meat?
2.
Adding a price
tag affects our decision making by…
3.
Christmas involves
the communal eating of turkey as does thanksgiving. What do these and similar
examples prove? The reason for this is the wish to…
4.
Eating meat can threaten
our identities as moral people because…
5.
Watch: Festinger and Carlsmith Dissonance Study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h27FuaUa7s and now read the account of the experiment.
What was the purpose of the experiment? Be precise. In order to do so, you will
need to tweak the text.
6.
Which group
experienced the most dissonance? We know this because they decided …
7.
Acc to Festinger,
people’s reactions to dissonance stems from the fact that…
8.
The names for
cuts of meat are all example of our
efforts to… There are two answers; find both.
9.
What does “this”
refer to in the phrase “this was done in two different ways”?
10.
What knock-on
effect does the way we deal with dissonance in the case of meat eating have? It
becomes…
12.
Our ethical
inconsistencies become resistant to change because our behaviour becomes…
WRITING TASK
Read
this last paragraph of the text:
It is time for a revolution in how we
talk about human beings, animals and the planet, and acknowledge our own
hypocrisies. Rather than doing mental gymnastics to justify unethical
behaviour, we must consider actually changing it. Identifying and addressing
even just a few of your guilt-ridden ethical inconsistencies is likely to make
you a happier person, and the planet a better place.
Now
write an essay in which you support the above ideas.
WHAT THE MEAT PARADOX REVEALS ABOUT MORAL DECISION
MAKING; KEY AND TEACHERS’NOTES
This simple and straightforward text deals
with the relatively complex issue of cognitive dissonance initially in the
context of eating meat and later in terms of its wider implications. It will
hopefully lead students to think about our hypocrisies as human beings and how
we can become a more moral society.
1.
Money changes our
relationship with morality / The very existence of money, along with complex
business and distribution channels, acts as a buffer between ourselves and the
origin of our products. This can make us behave in ways that are deeply
unethical.
2.
We can’t see the
acts first hand, so they feel like they are unrelated to us
3.
Meat-eating is
tied to social customs /Protect our identities (from a moral conflict)
4.
Bringing harm to
others is inconsistent with a view of oneself as a moral person
5.
What impact lying
and saying the experiment was enjoyable, fun and interesting and the compensation for it, would have on
participants’ rating of the task
6.
The participants
paid $1 / the experiment must have actually been enjoyable
7.
The existence of
dissonance is psychologically uncomfortable
8.
Conceptually
distancing ourselves from the real origin of our food; OR to make meat-eating seem acceptable by
dissociating it from the animal it came from
9.
Physically,
verbally and conceptually distancing ourselves from the real origin of our
food.
10.
Easier to be cruel
11.
Through the
process of dissonance reduction, the apparent immorality of certain behaviours
can seemingly disappear.” The first sentence of the paragraph would not be
acceptable.
12.
Normalized
