Seeing Meat Makes People Less Aggressive

According to new research seeing meat appears to make human beings significantly less aggressive.

Odd!


Researcher Frank Kachanoff says:
"I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively. I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition. I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior."

Kachanoff believed that humans may have evolved a predisposition to respond aggressively towards seeing meat. In the experiment, participats had to punish a script reader every time he made an error while sorting photos. Some photos were of meat whilst others were neutral.

Kachanoff believed that the use of 'ready to eat' meat images may have been the problem as when our ancestors were eating they would have been with friends/family and thus calm. He is interested in trying again using 'hunting' images instead, and expects to find different results.

Kachanoff's research is important because it looks at ways society may influence environmental factors to decrease the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Perhaps more pictures of food around would lead us all to be calmer!

Link to Article