# Disentangling the meat paradox: A comparative review of meat‐related conflicts across dietary behaviours

## TL;DR

This paper reviews how people experience and resolve conflicts related to meat consumption across different diets, highlighting how these conflicts persist and influence behavior.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a framework to distinguish types of meat-related conflicts and their consequences, offering new theoretical predictions.

## Key findings

- Meat-related conflicts vary in magnitude, frequency, and moralization across different dietary behaviors.
- Conflict experiences are influenced by boundary conditions such as capability, opportunity, and motivation.
- Conflict avoidance strategies can paradoxically increase the likelihood of experiencing conflict.

## Abstract

A growing field of research examines how people experience and resolve cognitive conflicts in their behaviours, particularly in relation to meat consumption. Despite the alleged importance of conflict in behaviour change, most research focuses on how conflict motivates individuals to change or maintain their conflicted behaviour but disregards that conflict may persist even after successful behaviour change. This oversight has contributed to seemingly contradictory conclusions by conflating different kinds of conflicts and has arguably constrained theory development. Our review thus delineates (a) how people with different dietary patterns in meat consumption are affected by meat‐related ambivalence and dissonance, (b) differences in the characteristics (magnitude, frequency, moralization) of these conflicts, (c) boundary conditions of why conflict experiences arise, and (d) how these factors determine the downstream consequences of conflict. This allows us to derive several novel predictions, ranging from why conflict avoidance strategies may sometimes paradoxically increase the likelihood of experiencing conflict to the distinct roles of capability, opportunity, and motivation in shaping the behavioural consequences of conflict. By re‐evaluating prevailing assertions in the literature on meat‐related conflict, we offer numerous theoretical and practical implications regarding cognitive conflict and the psychology of meat consumption and avoidance.