Mostly Vegetarian,But Flexible About It: Investigating How Meat-Reducers Express Social Identity Around Their Diets

Abstract

Beyond indicating that one does not eat meat, the decision to identify as vegetarian signals social identity. Yet many people limit their meat intake without giving up meat entirely: These people are called flexitarians (a term combining the words, “flexible” and “vegetarian”). Some flexitarians, despite eating meat, consider themselves to be vegetarian. Through a preregistered study (N = 837), we investigated how flexitarians express social identity around their diets—namely, how they self-identify on a continuous scale ranging from meat-eater (i.e., omnivorous) to vegetarian. Over and above actual eating behavior, two psychosocial variables emerged as significant predictors of flexitarians’ levels of vegetarian identification: the centrality of meat-reduced dieting to their identity and their beliefs about carnism (the ideology of eating animals). These results suggest that greater consideration of meat-reduced eating behaviors offers promise for elucidating the intersections of social identity and moral judgment.