Vegetarians Crave Power And Success More Than Meat Eaters Do, Study Finds

I stole that title, ripped it right off, word-for-word, from the Study Finds website, a source rich in The Science exaggerations. I pulled off this heist because I can’t think of a better way to summarize the asininity of the thing.

I loathe questionnaire research. I’ve even participated in it, and so got to know it well. Complex, even impenetrable, emotional states are assigned arbitrary values, which are then compared between various groups, hoping wee P-values will show up and prove differences exist and are universal.

Any number of criticisms to these studies can be made, and I have given them many times, but the chief is the Do Something Fallacy. “Briggs, if we don’t ask this validated questions with arbitrary numerical values assigned to answers, then we won’t be able to do something.”

Validated? Do you mean you have some device which plumbs the bottomless depth of emotional and intellectual states of people, and can tie the measures from this to the scored questionnaires?

“No, it means we asked the questions more than once.”

The Study Finds points us to the peer-reviewed paper “Rethinking vegetarianism: Differences between vegetarians and non-vegetarians in the endorsement of basic human values” by John B Nezlek in PLOS One.

Terrific news! Science has discovered the set of basic human values! A tremendous breakthrough!

Never mind. The guy asked vegetarians of various stripe and meat eaters questions from Schwartz’s Portrait Value Questionnaire.

So no basic human values, but Schwartz’s human values.

Anyway, this “instrument”—they love to call questionnaires “instruments” to steal from the prestige of “hard” science—is scored along several named dimensions, one of which being the Schwartzian human value of “Universalism”. Lo, it was discovered vegetarians had a mean score of 0.374 (not 0.373) and non-vegetarians had a mean of 0.262. Since 0.374 > 0.262, and this difference is accompanied by a wee P-value, Nezlek is allowed to say that vegetarians have more Universalism than non-vegetarians. Here’s what he says about this supposed trait:

Previous research has tended to find negative relationships between Universalism and meat consumption and positive relationships between Universalism and motives to reduce meat consumption. Hayley et al. [9] and de Boer et al. [8] found that Universalism was positively related to intentions to reduce meat consumption, and similarly, Allen et al. [10] and Lehto et al. [7] found that Universalism was negatively related to meat consumption. 

We already know most Experts don’t like meat, so this comes as no surprise. Yet we still want to know what this Universalism is. It is assessed by answering how alike imaginary people in these sort of questions are “like you” (the numbers correspond to the questionnaire’s):

• 3. She thinks it is important that every person in the world be treated equally. She believes everyone should have equal opportunities in life.
• 23. She believes all the worlds’ people should live in harmony. Promoting peace among all groups in the world is important to her.

I do not think every person should be treated equally. This is insane. It means I should expect a blind toddler should be allowed his chance to fly the plane. I also do not believe everyone should have equal opportunities in life, because it is an impossibility, and that the only way to approach anything like would be to enforce (through a group of elite Experts) community of property, which is to say, communism.

Well, this is all in favor of the questionnaire, because I eat meat with relish (good pun!). And it’s already known vegetarians (at least in the States) lean woke (less good pun), in the direction of these questions. Which means this new The Science adds nothing, and thus becomes scientism of the first kind (in which something that everybody already knows is certified by science).

But what about craving Power? Here are all of the Power questions:

• 2. It is important to her to be rich. She wants to have a lot of money and expensive things.
• 17. It is important to her to be in charge and tell others what to do. She wants people to do what she says.
• 39. She always wants to be the one who makes the decisions. She likes to be the leader.

It is well they chose the female pronoun in these questions, as another word for Power here, and the interpretation most consonant with what we know about the personalities of vegetarians, is Scolding.

It’s worth noting the first of these questions are the opposite of Universalism.

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