Do Only Jerks Eat Meat?

We’ve known for some time that our personalities—that is, our characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—influence many aspects of our lifestyles, including the behaviors that impact our health.

We all have ‘those’ friends who wake up at dawn to train for their next triathlon, while our extraverted mates are just rolling home from a boozy night out. The former are most likely meal planning and measuring macronutrients, while the latter are chatting with friends over one last cigarette.

These are amusing differences in how we approach the world, for sure, but also ones with serious implications given evidence that our highly conscientious ‘triathlon’ friends have around a 40% lower death rate from all causes compared to our more chilled-out pals.

Five Factors and Food

The ‘five-factor’ (or OCEAN) model is probably the most studied theory of personality in the domain of health research, and shows consistent and significant links with many health-related behaviors. This model states that each of us are a mixture of high and low scores on five core personality traits—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—and this mix leads us to act in predictable ways.

By now, much has been written on the link between the OCEAN model and diet, with personality, particularly higher neuroticism and lower conscientiousness, associated with increased BMI and poorer dietary habits. It seems that these specific personality characteristics leave us prone to more impulsive eating, as food is used to salve negative emotions.

Visionary Vegetarians and Callous Carnivores

More recently, however, research has begun to look beyond body weight to other aspects of the diet, finding similarly compelling associations between OCEAN traits and our propensity to eat more sustainably.

For example, people with higher openness tend to eat less red meat—the type of meat that is worse for the environment—while those who are more conscientious are more likely to adopt sustainable, plant-rich diets.

Conversely, it’s the extraverts amongst us who consume more meat overall, while those who score lower on agreeableness—the aforementioned 'jerks' of the world—report more barriers to consuming plant-based diets, including greater attachment to meat and lower pro-environmental attitudes. On the other hand, vegans usually rate much higher on agreeableness compared to omnivores.

Drilling into these associations, researchers have explored which specific sub-facets of these traits explain dietary differences, concluding that the intellectually explorative nature of high-openness individuals makes them more willing to try new dietary trends, including going vegan or sampling novel proteins.

Conversely, higher meat consumption among those with lower agreeableness appears to stem from lower levels of compassion, whilst the agreeableness sub-facet of "politeness" plays a lesser role in preferences for meat.

Other work has gone further into exploring the personalities of meat-eaters compared to vegetarians, finding significant associations with dark triad personality traits (i.e. Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy), and greater expression of social dominance orientation, self-centredness, and entitlement.

Appealing to A-holes

While these associations may be interesting, the question remains as to whether they are worth knowing if our personalities represent a fixed and enduring orientation to the world? If we can’t change who we are, how can we possibly change what we eat?

One clear application here is in how we adapt the ways we "sell" plant-based foods to different personality profiles. This would involve using a more refined approach to market segmentation that includes profiling individuals based on their OCEAN traits, not just their sociodemographic characteristics—an option that is possible through analysis of their social media footprints or online shopping habits.

Highly open and more conscientious individuals are the obvious "low hanging fruit" as the groups most likely to be receptive to changing food choices after reading pro-environmental or pro-animal welfare messaging.

Extraverts and less-agreeable folk are a harder nut to crack. Yet knowing their personality profiles offers us unique, and potentially effective, entry points to persuasion.

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For example, as extraverts may be eating more meat during social gatherings or when dining out with friends, we could target these occasions specifically, working to emphasize how non-meat choices can be shared and enjoyed with others.

Equally, as those who score lower on agreeableness are less prone to empathize with others, traditional persuasive messages that highlight the health or societal benefits of dietary shifts are unlikely to work. Instead, marketing meat-free diets in terms of their clear benefits to the self, or otherwise highlighting the decision to change diet as a way to assert personal dominance or affirm self-identity may prove more effective.

Interestingly, these approaches have already been explored in the context of tailoring plant-based promotions to different genders, given consistently observed differences in levels of agreeableness and in preferences for meat consumption between men and women.

More work is obviously needed to craft and test the exact promotional messages that will appeal most to different OCEAN profiles. However, given the accumulation of research to show that our personalities influence our dietary choices, it is a factor that should be considered more extensively as part of our ongoing efforts to promote healthier, more sustainable diets for all.

Or, at least, the highly agreeable readers will concur.