How to respond to vegan criticism, from the research on disagreement

Work out which kind of criticism you’re hearing, answer that one, and sound open before you try to sound right. You may be the worst judge of that last part. In a 2020 study, people’s own sense of how receptive they had been barely matched how the people they argued with heard them.

The people in that study weren’t undergraduates. They were state and local government executives in a continuing education program, each paired with someone who disagreed with them on a policy question. The researchers had trained an algorithm to read receptiveness from people’s words in an earlier online study, and its scores for the executives lined up with how their partners rated them while having nothing to do with how the executives rated themselves. The ones their partners and the algorithm saw as more receptive were judged better teammates, advisors and workplace representatives; their own self-evaluations predicted none of it. I’d like to think I’m the reasonable one when the crop-deaths line comes out over dessert. On this evidence, I’m the last person who’d know.

Most criticism is one of four things

In 2015, Piazza and colleagues asked meat eaters to give three reasons why it is OK to eat meat, and four reasons, that it is natural, normal, necessary and nice, covered 83% to 91% of the justifications they gave. People who endorsed those four more strongly ate meat and animal products more often and were more committed to eating meat. Among the meat eaters in one of the studies, those who endorsed the four more strongly also felt less guilt about their animal-product choices, which the authors read as the four Ns doing a guilt-relieving job.

That changes what a good answer looks like, because the four aren’t the same kind of claim. Necessary is a question about nutrition, and someone asking it in good faith deserves a real answer with sources, which is why I’d point them to our piece on whether vegans get enough protein rather than improvise one between courses. Natural and normal are claims about human nature and about what most people do. You can agree with the description and still say why it doesn’t settle the question for you. Nice isn’t an argument at all. Bacon tastes good to the people who eat it, and there is nothing to rebut.

If a justification partly exists to make someone feel better, then winning the argument against it takes away the comfort before it offers anything in its place. That is a reason to slow down, not to stop.

The case against being nice about it

There is a strong argument that all this softening is the wrong lesson. If you believe animals are harmed by what’s on the table, hedging that claim to keep dinner pleasant looks like a small dishonesty. Being liked was never the goal. A vegan who cushions every sentence can stay agreeable for years and change nobody’s mind, and a movement made of agreeable people risks treating comfort as progress. I take that seriously. Every receptive phrase in this article could be used to dodge the point.

Where I part company with it is on what the research is actually asking for. Feinberg and Willer found that people arguing for a political position spontaneously reached for arguments grounded in their own moral values, not the values of the people they were trying to persuade, and that arguments reframed to fit the other side’s values were usually more effective. The reframed appeals worked because they made the position look more consistent with what the listener already valued. As I read it, reframing translates the claim and leaves its strength where it was. An uncle who cares about fairness and an aunt who cares about tradition won’t be moved by the same sentence, and neither of them was ever going to be moved by the sentence I’d say to another vegan.

So our line is to hold the position at full strength and say it in the listener’s terms. Hedge what you claim about the person in front of you. Don’t hedge what you believe happens to animals.

Sound open before you sound right

The receptiveness researchers turned what their algorithm learned into a four-part recipe: positive statements rather than negations, saying out loud that you understand the other view, finding points of agreement, and hedging to soften claims. People shown the recipe before replying to someone they disagreed with were rated as more receptive, and readers on the other side of the issue wanted to collaborate with them more. Their replies were also rated as more persuasive by ideological opponents, a result the researchers say surprised both them and the participants. On Wikipedia, editors who wrote more receptive posts were less likely to be personally attacked by editors who disagreed with them.

It also seems to spread. In a follow-up accepted by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2024, training one person in receptive language increased its use by a political opponent, and a single receptive reply made the opponent who read it rate its writer more favorably, and nudged up their view of the writer’s political side as well. At a holiday table that could be as plain as “I can see why you’d say that, and you’re right that most people eat meat. Here’s why I don’t.” It costs nothing except the satisfaction of a clean win, which I was never going to get anyway.

The part I’m least sure about is how far any of this travels. None of the receptiveness studies was about food: the 2020 online experiments used statements on policing and campus sexual assault, the executives argued about the death penalty, public sector unions and policing, and the Wikipedia threads covered whatever the editors were working on. The outcomes were ratings, the words people used, and whether a Wikipedia thread turned to personal attacks, and nothing we read measured what anyone ate afterwards. Maybe a relative who feels heard eats exactly the same dinner next year. Would you still call that a good conversation? If the talk turns to whether vegans are simply too much, our look at why vegans can seem so extreme picks it up from there.