This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Naming a chicken and describing its favorite habits is enough to make preschoolers choose poultry less often. This effect translates into verbal declarations and actual meal choices, but food preferences still most often win over empathy, according to a new paper by researchers from SWPS University.
Reducing meat in your daily diet has benefits, as it is associated with lower health risks, enhanced environmental sustainability and reduced animal suffering. Previous research has shown that identifying individuals by name represents a cost-effective yet potent psychological intervention that elicits favorable attitudes toward both humans and animals. In human relations, the identification of individual victims, often referred to as the identifiable victim effect (IVE), increases willingness to help and promotes actual prosocial behavior, such as greater charitable donations.
Learning an animal's name can also change attitudes toward it, but it has not yet been established whether this affects actual meat consumption and to what extent it applies to different animal species. Researchers from SWPS University decided to look for answers to these questions. They described the results in the paper "Naming the one to save the many: The effect of animal identifiability on children's reduced meat preference," published in the scientific journal Appetite.
Preschool children (5–6 years old) were invited to participate in the study. In the first experiment, the researchers wanted to replicate results obtained in 2024 showing that identifying animals and perceiving them as similar to humans makes children want to befriend the animals and express reluctance to eat their meat. The researchers also checked whether children would be willing to eat meat from other chickens and different animal species.
During the experiment, children were presented with the silhouette of a chicken. In the identifiability group, the bird was given the name Lelek and a short description of its individual characteristics, including favorite foods and everyday habits in the yard. In the control group, children received the same information, but without a name and presented as a general description of the entire species.
Then, the children were asked to build their own toy sandwiches using the provided items, including artificial slices of cheese and tomato, as well as poultry and pork cold cuts. In the second experiment, the children were divided into three groups. The first group learned about Chico the chicken as a unique individual (similarly to the first experiment); Chico the chicken was introduced to the second group as one of many similar representatives of its species, while the control group received general information about chickens.
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