Carnism is the ideology underlying animal exploitation, and can be seen as a subfacet of speciesism, concerning the worldview of justifying meat eating. It is uphold by defense-mechanisms like denial, justification and cognitive distortions. When empirically examined, this construct showed two facets: carnistic defense and carnistic domination, which are negatively related to empathy and attitudes towards animals, as well as positively to authoritarianism, xenophobia, sexism and racism.
While veganism refers to a belief system regarding the treatment of animals, it raises the impression that most people who don’t fall into this category, also don’t have any beliefs about this subject whatsoever.
Because the dominant belief system of a society is considered the ’normal state‘, it often isn’t recognised that this belief system even exists. To raise awareness about this invisible set of beliefs that allows us to treat similar animals in very different ways (e.g. as a pet vs. as food), psychologist Prof. Melanie Joy coined the term carnism (carn = „flesh“, -ism indicating a belief system) in her book Why we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows.
Having a name for the carnistic worldview emphazises the possibility of choosing whether to eat animals, instead of taking this decision for granted. Since eating animals isn’t a necessity for most of the people in the world today, we have the opportunity of choosing, and the fundamental building blocks of making choices are the beliefs that we hold.
Joy argues that carnism can be seen as an subcomponent of speciesism. While speciesism describes the discrimination of other beings based on their species membership, carnism explicitly focuses on the beliefs and attitudes related to the killing of animals for meat. Because carnism expresses itself in violence toward animals, and this violence would challenge our core human values (such as justice and compassion which we hold as a social species), carnistic defenses can be determined, which lower the psychological load for the individual. These defense-mechanisms can be categorized into denial, justification and cognitive distortions 1.
You can get an overview over these defense-mechanisms in: cognitive dissonance and carnistic defense.
A study conducted by Monteiro et al. (2017) found that the ideology of carnism can be reduced to two main facets: carnistic defense, and carnistic domination, which were found empirically through a factor analysis. Carnistic defense includes justifications such as „eating meat is better for my health“, „humans should eat meat, because they have been doing it for thousands of years“, or „I could never give it up“. Furthermore this facet of carnism is related to denying, that eating meat leads to animal suffering (in this article you can get an overview over these arguments).
Carnistic domination on the other hand stands for the endorsement of the domination of animals (e.g. „Animals are dirty and deserve to be eaten.“, „I have the right to kill any animal I want.“, …). The derived carnistic inventory (CI) as a measure of these two facets showed to be negatively related empathy and to attitudes towards animals (including the support for animal rights and the belief that humans are animals, who evolved from other animals). Furthermore the CI is positively related to authoritarianism, xenophobia, and “system justification”. People with high scores in CI were more likely to perceive vegetarianism as a social and political threat, and espescially high carnistic domination scores were related to hostile and benevolent sexism, and symbolic racism.2
1 Joy, M. (2011). Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism: the Belief System That Enables Us to Eat Some Animals and Not Others. Berkeley, Calif.: Conari.
(click here for Joys blog ‚beyond carnism‘, in which she describes the main ideas)
2 Monteiro, C. A., Pfeiler, T. M., Patterson, M. D., & Milburn, M. A. (2017). The Carnism Inventory: Measuring the ideology of eating animals. Appetite, 113, 51-62. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2017.02.011
(click here to read the full article)
studies in green. 