Resistance to veganism: threat perceptions and negative stereotyping may undermine intentions to reduce meat consumption among meat-eaters

Despite increasing awareness and advocacy for meat-restricted diets, overall progress toward meat reduction remains limited. To better understand such resistance, we examined whether perceiving vegans as a cultural threat (threat to traditional meat-eating practices) or moral threat (threat to the ingroup's moral image) affects meat-eaters’ willingness to change their meat consumption, both directly and indirectly through positive and negative stereotyping of vegans. Across three studies conducted in Türkiye and the UK (one correlational and two pre-registered experiments manipulating threat; Total N = 1325), we found that threat related to veganism predicted lower intentions to restrict meat consumption, both directly and indirectly via stereotyping processes. While cultural and moral threats were conceptually distinct and showed differential associations in correlational analyses, experimental manipulations appeared to elicit a more general sense of symbolic threat. Nevertheless, across both experimental studies, perceiving vegans as a threat decreased positive stereotyping and increased negative stereotyping, which in turn related to lower intentions to reduce meat consumption. We discussed how threat-based evaluation of vegans and the associated stereotyping could create barriers to more sustainable reductions in meat consumption.