Why are vegans so extreme, or intolerant? What the studies show

Vegans are probably less judgmental than they seem. In a small follow-up to a 2012 study, student meat eaters expected vegetarians to judge their morality more harshly than the vegetarians did. The extreme label sticks for two reasons: a meat-free plate gets heard as a verdict on yours, and some animal-rights protest disrupts, which experiments find costs the movement support.

The vegetarian in that study didn’t have to say a word. Researchers asked 255 undergraduates who ate meat to rate vegetarians on ten scales, kind or mean and judgmental or non-judgmental among them. Half, assigned at random, first answered four questions about morality, including how vegetarians would rate theirs. Those questions told them nothing new about vegetarians, and that group still rated vegetarians less positively. In the paper’s first study, meat eaters saw only a small moral gap between meat eaters in general and vegetarians, and expected vegetarians to see that gap as almost 10 times larger. Asked for three words about vegetarians, 45% offered at least one word such as self-righteous or annoying. Three people filled the slots with phrases instead: “need more protein,” “eat more meat” and “no red meat”. The protein question gets everywhere.

The authors called the reaction do-gooder derogation, and then checked whether the fear was justified. In a small follow-up, meat eaters thought vegetarians rated them as more immoral than the vegetarians actually did, and the authors concluded that vegetarians look down on meat eaters somewhat but are “less self-righteous than they are perceived to be”. Those were vegetarians, not vegans, and students at a private university, so I read it as a strong hint rather than a census. What vegans think the stakes are is in our piece on whether veganism really helps animals.

Why vegans get it worse than vegetarians

Whatever the label, extreme or intolerant, the research finds the same bias, and vegans get more of it. In a paper first published in 2015, MacInnis and Hodson found omnivores rated vegetarians and vegans as negatively as, or more negatively than, several groups that are common targets of prejudice, and rated vegans worse than vegetarians. People who went meat-free for animal rights or the environment drew more of it than people who did it for their health. The vegans and vegetarians they surveyed reported meeting that negativity because of their diets.

A preregistered UK study in 2021 asked what the negativity is made of. Omnivores saw vegetarians and vegans as more moral than omnivores, and also stereotyped them more negatively, vegans especially, as more eccentric and above all more moralistic; those two impressions predicted finding them less socially attractive. Newspapers have a record here too. A 2011 study of UK national newspaper coverage from 2007 found veganism mostly discredited through ridicule or as too hard to keep up, with vegans cast as faddists or sentimentalists and, in some cases, as hostile extremists.

The researchers behind the 2021 study describe vegetarians and vegans as stigmatized moral minorities. In the US the minority part is not in doubt. In Gallup’s July 2023 poll, 1% of adults said they were vegan and 4% vegetarian.

The strongest case that vegans are extreme

Set the psychology aside and the charge still stands on two legs. The first is the belief. The Vegan Society defines veganism as a way of living that seeks to exclude all exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals, whether for food or for anything else. Even with the hedge built into that definition, “as far as is possible and practicable”, it rules out how roughly 99 in 100 US adults say they live (our arithmetic from the 1% who told Gallup they are vegan). A view that far from the mainstream is extreme in the plain sense of the word, and a vegan who sincerely holds it has every reason to treat dinner as a moral question rather than a matter of taste.

The second leg is tactics, and it’s the stronger one. Across six experiments, three of them preregistered, Feinberg, Willer and Kovacheff found that people backed a movement less when it used protest seen as harmful or highly disruptive, such as blocking highways or vandalizing property, and animal rights was one of the movements tested. In five of the six studies the backlash also cut support for the cause itself, largely whatever people’s prior views, because observers identified less with the movement; in the last three studies the authors traced that to judging the actions immoral and feeling less emotionally connected to the movement. The same authors note earlier research showing that extreme actions can pressure institutions and raise awareness, and call the trade-off the activist’s dilemma. So extreme is a fair word for some animal-rights protest, and the people using it aren’t only being defensive.

Where we land

Our line is that a firm moral belief isn’t extremism, and that much of what gets called vegan extremism is a reaction to the belief rather than to anything the vegan at the table did. The hedge in the definition does real work here. Vegans argue among themselves about what is possible and practicable, as our piece on why some vegans eat honey shows from the inside. Disruptive protest is a separate matter, and the Feinberg experiments give any vegan who cares about the cause a reason to weigh it carefully.

Some of the cost lands on people who aren’t vegan yet. In focus groups with US college students, non-vegans anticipated stigma if they ate like vegans and kept their distance, socially and in what they ate, to avoid it; the authors read vegan stigma as a barrier to plant-based diets.

The part I’m least sure about is how much of this a vegan can change by behaving well. In the 2012 experiment the trigger was four questions on a questionnaire. The authors also report a hint, which they call speculative, that students who rated vegetarians right after being reminded of vegetarians’ judgment ended up about as attached to eating meat as a baseline group, while those reminded only after rating them seemed to shore up their support. If that holds, the put-down is doing a job for the person making it, and good manners at the table may not take that job away. I hope it doesn’t hold. For the practical side of being the vegan at that table, there’s our guide to responding to vegan criticism.