The social cost of adopting a plant-based diet

Abstract

Dietary choices contribute to one’s environmental footprint and shape social identity. Evidence suggests that adopting plant-based diets (i.e., vegetarianism and veganism) may solve some environmental, health, and animal welfare issues. Yet, this decision leads to the formation of a social identity and out-group bias referred to as “vegephobia”. In this paper, I provide a first measure of the presence of vegephobia using social preferences in an online experimental economic environment. I estimate inequity aversion parameters of omnivore dictators (i.e., meat eaters) contingent on their matched partner’s dietary identity and test for the presence of vegephobia (pre-registered hypotheses). I also elicit recipients’ expectations of discriminatory behaviors. Confirmatory results reject the presence of vegephobia in the economic environment. Further exploratory results reveal some vegephobia driven by the dictators’ personal characteristics and social environments. Paradoxically, vegans report experiencing vegephobia outside of the experimental setup but expect pro-social choices from out-group members in the experiment. The results imply that vegephobia might be context-specific and that individuals are increasingly plant-based friendly.