Sacrificing Animals in the Name of Scientific Authority: The Relationship Between Pro-Scientific Mindset and the Lethal Use of Animals in Biomedical Experimentation

Abstract

The present research investigated how scientific authority increases the lethal use of animals in biomedical experimentation. In two behavioral studies (N = 151 and 150), participants were required to incrementally administer 12 doses of a toxic chemical to a 53-cm fish (in reality, a biomimetic robot) for research on animal learning. Consistent with the Engaged Followership Theory on obedience, participants placed in a pro-scientific mindset more severely harmed the laboratory animal. In a cross-sectional study (N = 351), participants in medical fields endorsed a more pro-scientific attitude than those in paramedical fields, which mediated their support for animal experimentation. Drawing on a representative European sample (N = 31,238), we also confirmed the specificity of this link by controlling for potential demographic and ideological confounds. In a final study (N = 1,598), instrumental harm was shown as mediating the link between a pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation.

Keywords

conformity obedience engaged followership scientific authority instrumental harm

Introduction

Most people have firm moral inhibitions toward violating universal moral codes that prohibit unnecessary violence toward living beings (Graham et al., 2013). However, individuals are also fully able to disengage from their moral convictions when doing so is dictated by specific circumstances or by what they consider as the pursuit of higher goals (Bandura, 1999). Scientific inquiry represents a culturally valued goal that may require the killing of animals in the case of animal experimentation for biomedical purposes. Since the enactment of the Nuremberg code, animal experimentation has become a mandatory phase in most biomedical development (Annas & Grondin, 1992), and every year, approximately 125 million animals are used worldwide as experimental resources (Knight, 2011; Taylor et al., 2008). They are considered to play a crucial role in medicine, pharmacology, and biotechnology and are used as models for human disease, as sources of organs or cells, as well as in animal experimentation, xeno-transplantation, and cloning (Monamy, 2017).

This widespread use of animal experimentation raises a moral paradox. While the Cartesian view of animals merely as insensitive machines has been widely disproved by scientific studies showing how the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral lives of animals are complex (de Waal, 2016), and sometimes similar to human capacities (which justifies their use as models), in laboratories, animals are ultimately considered merely as scientific tools. This potentially induces moral dilemmas for laboratory staff who perform invasive or painful experiments, and who occasionally feel empathic reactions or distress (Birke et al., 2007; Filippi et al., 2010; Westbury & Neumann, 2008), the intensity of which is a direct function of the phylogenetic closeness of the animals involved (Miralles et al., 2019; Plous, 1993). For this reason, when scientists administer a harmful treatment to an animal during an experimental protocol, they may need to actively overcome or repress their personal affective reaction. Most of the time, this emotional disengagement is possible because the aim of the behavior is grounded in beliefs regarding the authority of scientific endeavor (Birke et al., 2007).

Motivated Obedience

The present research starts with the idea that a motivated obedience toward the authority of science lies at the core of an individual’s moral disengagement when they are asked to perform biomedical animal experimentation. By motivated obedience, we mean that individuals do mainly follow extrinsic rules of conduct when they perform lethal operations on animals for scientific purposes in research institutions.

They do not personally choose to use and sacrifice animals, or to sometimes expose these animals to painful procedures, but they perform such acts as a part of their professional requirements. However, even if these potentially problematic behaviors are formally imposed by their role, they are genuinely and actively involved in consenting, and generally believe in the utility and the legitimacy of the professional rules and procedures which they apply. This commitment is grounded in the cultural authority of science, which represents a major pillar of the legitimization of animal experimentation (Bauer et al., 2019).

In the context of our research, obedience toward scientific authority is a specific type of motivated obedience. Motivated obedience should therefore be contrasted with the “blind obedience” that is generally associated with Milgram’s (1974) studies on obedience. In the perspective developed in the present research, obedience is not conceptualized as a passive (or “agentic”) state involving an “ideological abrogation” (Milgram, 1974, p. 145) but is, rather, a function of individual’s identification with the scientific enterprise underlying experimental research (Haslam et al., 2014; Reicher & Haslam, 2011), and may therefore be more adequately understood as an engaged followership (see Haslam & Reicher, 2017, for review), that is “an active identification with the scientific project and those leading it” (Haslam et al., 2014, p. 473). We may consider that obedience toward scientific authority is a specific type of motivated obedience.

In the present study, our aim was to experimentally and cross-sectionally demonstrate that a pro-scientific mindset increased attitudinal and behavioral support for painful and potentially deadly experiments on animals. We also elaborated and tested the hypothesis that a pro-scientific mindset was related to a preference for a specific form of lay moral thinking, instrumental harm, defined as a “willingness to harm and even kill others when this is needed to achieve a better outcome” (Kahane et al., 2017, p. 135), that would mediate support for animal experimentation (more on this to follow).

Scientific Authority and Support for Animal Experimentation

The way in which scientific authority influences behaviors was explored 50 years ago in a series of classical experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram, who observed that the electric shocks administered to a reluctant victim by laypersons were maximal in a scientific institution of high prestige (Yale University) and lowest in a commercial building in Bridgeport (Milgram, 1974, Experiment 10). In the same vein, Milgram (1974) showed that obedience was lower when the experimenter was presented as an “ordinary man” rather than a scientist (Milgram, 1974, Experiment 13), and considered potentially important in interpreting his results, in terms of “the prestige of the scientist, the prestige and worth of the research” (Reicher et al., 2012, p. 317). While the parallel between Milgram’s obedience studies and animal use in laboratory experiments seems relevant here, the psychological process proposed by Milgram (1974) to explain the phenomenon of obedience as an “agentic state” in which “responsibility is cast off, and individuals become thoughtless agents of action” (p. 176) could be argued to be circular and does not properly capture critical aspects of the phenomenon (Gibson, 2019; Miller, 1986). Recent studies on obedience have increasingly focused on the social legitimacy and identity involved in obedience (Reicher et al., 2014). It is currently acknowledged that a participant’s willingness to administer electric shocks cannot be properly explained purely by blind obedience. Instead, it may be a function of their active identification with the scientific enterprise underlying the experiment, and the perceived legitimacy of the experimenter’s injunctions (Haslam et al., 2014; Reicher & Haslam, 2011). According to Engaged Followership Theory, participants follow the experimenter’s directions because they believe themselves to be “contributing to a moral, worthy, and progressive cause” (Haslam et al., 2015, p. 60).

Despite the appeal of the Engaged Followership Theory, there is still no direct empirical demonstration of this theoretical perspective on obedience using Milgram-like behavioral measures. Instead, this perspective has mainly been based on qualitative studies based on Milgram’s archives (Haslam et al., 2014, 2015) along with a study based on immersive digital reality, which showed that participants’ relative identification with the experimenter and their scientific goals was a good predictor of the maximum level of shock they administered (Haslam et al., 2015; see also Reicher et al., 2012). However, a test of the Engaged Followership Theory with Milgram-like strong behavioral measures has been absent (Gibson, 2019). The present research therefore aims to fill this gap. It also intends to extend its scope and provide additional evidence on the specificity of the link between a scientific mindset and support for animal experimentation, and to conceptualize and empirically test the psychological process involved.

Overview of the Present Research

First, after the development and validation of a new realistic and involving biomedical protocol on animal experimentation (Study 1a), we experimentally investigate how the salience of scientific authority induces individuals to administer painful chemical injections to an animal target (Study 1b). Then, in two cross-sectional studies involving a sample of medical and paramedical students (Study 2a) and a large and representative European sample (Study 2b), we assess the generalizability and specificity of the relationship between a pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation. Finally, we further clarify the process by which a pro-scientific attitude possibly influences an individual’s support for animal experimentation (Study 3). We elaborate and test the hypothesis of a mediating effect of a core dimension on utilitarianism, instrumental harm, which is conceptually and empirically distinct from motivated obedience and is defined as a “willingness to harm and even kill others when this is needed to achieve a better outcome” (Kahane et al., 2017, p. 135).

Study 1a: Development of a Behavioral Measure of Animal Objectification

This preliminary study aimed to develop a completely new experimental protocol in which participants were required to incrementally administer a noxious chemical substance to an animal (which they believed to be a fish, although in reality it was a biomimetic robot) involved in a learning experiment, leading to the death of the supposed animal. The administered substance was explained to the participants to stimulate learning in the context of a research protocol investigating Alzheimer’s disease. However, an important side effect of the drug was its consequences on vital functions at high dosages. To validate this new experimental paradigm, we measured relevant inter-individual variables involved in destructive behavior toward animals (Amiot & Bastian, 2015, for review) and expected that individuals’ reluctance to carry out the task would be contingent on these variables.

The first of these variables was social dominance orientation (SDO; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), a pro-hierarchic orientation that represents the value that people place on non-egalitarian and hierarchically structured relationships among social groups. In the hierarchy of social categories, animals represent “the quintessential low status group” (Dhont et al., 2019, p. 31), which is why attitudes toward them are reported to be more negative among people with high SDO (Caviola et al., 2019; Hoffarth et al., 2019). Another validation measure was speciesism, defined as the “belief that humans are intrinsically more valuable than individuals of other species” (Caviola et al., 2019, p. 2). Speciesism predicts behavioral preferences toward humans and “superior” animals in relation to allocating money or time, and is related to the devaluation of the perceived intelligence and suffering capability of animals (Caviola et al., 2019). We also measured dispositional empathy, which is inversely related to support for animal experimentation (Broida et al., 1993), as well as gender and vegetarian or vegan diet (Amiot & Bastian, 2015; Broida et al., 1993; Ormandy & Schuppli, 2014).

In summary, we included a selection of relevant measures to check the validity of our new protocol measuring harm toward animals. We expected a positive relationship between SDO, speciesism, and the intensity of harm inflicted on the animal during the experiment, and a negative relationship with empathy, vegetarianism, and (female) gender.

Method

Data availability

Materials and data for the five studies are openly available on OSF.

https://osf.io/6tvgz/

Participants

Because of resource constraints (Lakens, 2021), we were willing to recruit 150 participants to this pilot study. Using G*Power 3.1 (Faul et al., 2007), we carried out a sensitivity analysis (setting an error alpha rate of .05, a power of .80, 150 participants, and one predictor). The analysis indicated that with this design, the minimum effect we could detect between the drug administration task and one of our predictors would be a Cohen’s d = .46. In total, 152 participants (95 females, 55 males, and two people who did not indicate their gender) were recruited. Their ages ranged from 19 to 71 years, and the sample comprised 45.4% students, 32.3% workers, 14.6% unemployed, and 7.7% who omitted to indicate their activity. The percentage of vegetarians or vegans was 10.9%. Participants were recruited through the local press to take part in a 40-min experiment, which was presented as an observational study of animal behavior during a learning task. They would be paid 15 euros (US$16.5) for their participation. They were first invited to complete an online questionnaire to measure inter-individual variables and to check their eligibility for inclusion.¹

Measures

SDO was measured using an eight-item scale (Ho et al., 2015) containing items such as “Some groups of people are simply not the equals of others” and “It is unjust to try to make groups equal” (M = 1.93, SD = 0.55, Cronbach’s α = .72). To measure speciesism, we used the six-item Speciesism scale by Caviola et al. (2019), which includes items such as “Morally, animals always count for less than humans” and “Humans have the right to use animals however they want to” (M = 2.09, SD = 0.65, Cronbach’s α = .72). We also used the seven-item Empathic Concern scale by Davis (1983), which includes items such as “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them” and “Other people’s misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal” (reverse scored) (M = 3.88, SD = 0.57, Cronbach’s α = .77). The items from the three scales were presented as 5-point Likert-type scales. We imputed the median score of the distribution to sporadic missing values (less than 5%). Finally, we regarded participants as vegetarians if they replied positively to the following question: “I am vegetarian (or) vegan.”

Procedure

Learning protocol

Upon their arrival, participants were shown a short video containing various items of scientific and procedural information (Supplemental Material 2). Then, they were seated at a table in front of a screen. Three meters from the table was a large aquarium (200 cm × 200 cm × 80 cm, containing 3,000 L of water). Inside the aquarium, what appeared to be a 53-cm goldfish was moving around. This was actually not a real fish, but a biomimetic robot (Airo 9 model) covered by very realistic silicone rubber which had been modeled and painted by the designer Alain Quercia. The choice of the fish was consistent with the fact that most of contemporary laboratory research works are based on rodents and fish. Moreover, fish robots appear more realistic than mammal robots because of their less complex movements. Participants were instructed to click on the first of 12 buttons, which triggered the following sequence: (a) the injection via motorized syringe into the water of 10 mL of the toxic pharmacological substance (which was actually just water colored yellow), (b) the triggering of a spotlight which illuminated a specific perimeter of the aquarium for 12 s, and (c) the emission of bubbles during those 12 s from the floor of the aquarium. Then, the participants were asked to count the number of times the fish went behind an orange frame in a time window of 25 s. The participants were told that the fish had previously been trained to move toward this frame when the stimulation (i.e., light and bubbles) was delivered, and that it was expected that the treatment would increase its sensitivity to the stimuli. When the time window was over, they had to click on the next button and so on until the 12th and final button (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Schematic representation of the experimental setting.

Below some of the buttons, the expected probability of the death of the fish was written (Figure 2) as follows: 0% probability of death (Button 1), 33% (Button 3), 50% (Button 6), 75% (Button 9), and 100% (Button 12). Moreover, the cardiac pace of the animal was visualized via an oscilloscope, which also produced auditory feedback. Contingent to the number of doses injected, the sine wave and sounds became increasingly erratic, reflecting cardiac distress. A short video of the setting is available at https://youtu.be/exNHKprKNwI.

Figure 2.

The numeric device.

If a participant stated that they were unwilling to continue, then the experimenter stated as follows: “For our research, it is important that you go on until 12, but as was indicated in the consent form, you are allowed to stop at any time.” If the participant repeated their intention to stop, they were told by the experimenter, “you want to stop, are you sure?”

When the experiment was over, the participants were shown into another room for a filmed semi-directive funnel interview and to complete a final evaluation survey. Please see Figures 3 and 4, and Supplemental Material 4.

Figure 3.

The full setting.

Figure 4.

The motorized syringe containing the supposed toxic substance.

Post-experimental screening procedure and final sample

Two independent judges were asked to watch the videos of the debriefing sessions and assign codes to the participants based on their responses. Participants who expressed no substantial doubts about the aim of the experiment were coded 1. If a participant expressed slight doubts about the meaning of the experiment, but without threatening the overall credibility of the cover story, they were coded 2. The judges were instructed to assign Code 2 to a participant if they were unsure whether the participant believed what they were told during the experiment or not. Finally, participants who expressed clear doubts about core aspects of the study (e.g., if they suspected that the substance that they administered or the fish were fake) were coded 3.

Analysis of the coding indicated a 91.4% initial convergence among judges (139 cases out of 152), and 100% convergence was reached after discussion of the divergent cases. Ultimately, 73.7% (N = 112) of participants were coded 1; 11.8% were coded 2 (N = 18); and 13.8% (N = 21) were coded 3. One participant in the latter category who was included by error in the study (a psychology student, see exclusion criteria) was excluded from the analysis. Only participants coded 1 or 2 were included in the main analysis (N = 130, 65.4% female, aged 19–71 years, M_age = 31.74 years, SD_age = 13.73 years, 10.3% vegetarians).² Finally, participants with missing values on gender (N = 2), vegetarianism (N = 1), or personality variables (N = 3) were listwise deleted.

Results

As shown in Figure 5, the shape of the distribution was bimodal. While 23.1% of participants refused to begin the task (N = 30), 54.6% fully completed the task through to the end (N = 71). Between 0.8% and 3.8% of participants stopped at one of the 11 remaining intermediary modalities. To analyze the relationships between individual variables and the number of injections, taking into account the bimodal distribution, we therefore compared those who were opposed to pressing the first button (0 injections, coded 0) to all of the others combined (coded 1). Please see Figure 5.

Figure 5.

Bimodal relationship between harmful injections and the decision to stop participating in the experiment.

Main results

A logistic regression analysis was performed to estimate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) of every variable in a single block (Table 1). The results showed that SDO, speciesism, and vegetarianism were significantly related to the quantity of toxic substance administered to the target, whereas it was not the case for age, gender, and empathy. The overall model accounted for 42% of the variance (Nagelkerke’s pseudo R²). Please see Table 1.

Table 1.

Logistic Regression Results Contrasting Participants Who Did Not Press the First Button (Coded 0) to All of the Combined Others (Coded 1), Study 1a.

Variable	B	SE	Exp(B)	95% CI	Significance
Age	−0.36	0.01	0.96	[0.93, 1.00]	.058
Gender	−0.46	0.60	0.62	[0.19, 2.04]	.441
SDO	1.57	0.57	4.83	[1.55, 15.01]	.006
Speciesism	1.48	0.46	4.40	[1.77, 10.93]	.001
Vegetarianism	−0.68	0.24	0.50	[0.31, 0.81]	.006
Empathy	−0.02	0.47	0.97	[0.38, 2.47]	.965
Constant	−1.47	2.52	0.23	/	.559

Note. CI = confidence interval; SDO = social dominance orientation.

Ancillary analysis

According to the Engaged Followership Theory (Reicher & Haslam, 2011), it was expected that participants in the experiment would positively rate their participation in the experiment (see Haslam et al., 2015). Overall, the participants were satisfied with the experiment (M = 3.75, SD = 4.00). Moreover, the more the participants injected the toxic product into the fish’s tank, the more they were satisfied (ρ = .32, p < .001) and considered the task to be easy, interesting, and useful (ρ = .23, .20, and .22, respectively, p < .05). Please see Supplemental Material 4.

Discussion

We developed a new experimental protocol in which participants were required to incrementally administer a noxious chemical substance to an animal involved in a learning experiment, leading to the death of the animal. To check the validity of this new measure, we analyzed the relationship between relevant individual factors and the quantity of toxic substance administered to the laboratory animal. We observed that the credibility of the overall protocol was appropriate, as only a low proportion of participants had to be excluded because of suspicions regarding the experiment. As we had hypothesized, we observed that the administration of the lethal substance was positively related to SDO and speciesism, and that vegetarianism was inversely related to the completion of the protocol. In conclusion, our behavioral protocol provided consistent results and seemed fully appropriate to behaviorally measure the destructive use of an animal during a biomedical experiment.

Study 1b: The Influence of a Pro-Scientific Mindset on Animal Harm

If science represents a cultural authority, the mere priming of science should increase a participant’s commitment to scientific expectations. In this study, the hypotheses were preregistered (https://osf.io/6tvgz/).³ We hypothesized that the salience of science would encourage the administration of the toxic substance to the target fish. We expected that a participant’s increased adherence to the scientific goal and the priming of their support for science would increase their conformity to scientific expectations, regardless of the psychological cost of inducing pain and killing the fish. This perspective was developed in line with the Engaged Followership Theory, which supposes that obedience is a function of identification with the scientific enterprise underlying experimental research (Haslam et al., 2014; Reicher & Haslam, 2011). The same inter-individual measures as in Study 1a were included, with the same hypothesis.

Method

Participants

Based on the conclusive previous study, we recruited 150 participants to this study. The sensitivity analysis we ran on G*Power indicated that our design allowed us to detect a minimal effect of the priming task on the toxic substance administration of Cohen’s d = .40 (in the t-test component, one-tailed, setting an error alpha rate of .05, a power of .80, and 75 participants in each of the two conditions).

The sample of this study is composed of 150 participants (98 females, 51 males, and one who did not indicate his or her gender), with ages ranging from 18 to 65 years. The sample included 48.7% students, 35.3% workers, 13.3% unemployed, and 2.7% who omitted to indicate their current activity. Moreover, 16.3% of the participants were vegetarians. We relied on the same recruitment procedure and the same exclusion criteria that were used in Study 1a.

Measures

The same scales were selected as in Study 1a: SDO (M = 1.88, SD = 0.64, Cronbach’s α = .68), speciesism, (M = 1.90, SD = 0.68, Cronbach’s α = .78), and empathic concern (M = 3.92, SD = 0.58, Cronbach’s α = .75). All the items were presented using 5-point Likert-type scales. The mean score of the distribution was imputed to missing values (less than 5%).

Procedure

Induction of pro-scientific salience

Following the completion of the consent form, the participants were randomly placed either in a science promotion condition or in a science critical condition. Following a previously established procedure (Haslam et al., 1999; Reicher, Birney, & Haslam, unpublished, quoted in Haslam & Reicher, 2017), the participants in the science promotion condition were asked to write down three things that were important about science, to indicate what they liked about science, and to state what they felt they had in common with scientists. In the science critical condition, they were asked to list three things they believed to be problematic about science, what they disliked about science, and what differentiated them from scientists. The experimenter who handled the salience instruction with the participants (and who remained next to them during the experiment) was blind to the experimental conditions. To check for the effectiveness of the manipulation, participants were then asked to answer a 5-point Likert-type scale composed of five items adapted from Gonzalez-Franco et al. (2018), including items such as “I fully share the aims of science,” and “I feel close links with people to whom science is the most important thing in their life” (M = 3.63, SD = 0.67, α = .79).

The development of the overall protocol was almost identical to that described in Study 1a, with only slight modifications made to it to improve its realism and impact (please see Supplemental Material 6).

Post-experimental screening procedure and final sample

All the participants were coded 1, 2, or 3 by independent judges following the same criteria used in Study 1a. The procedure used to achieve the final categorization was slightly different from that of the first study, as five judges watched the whole or some of the videos, and the final code was chosen following the modal categorizations of those judges. Three participants were excluded because they had to leave the experiment before the end for independent reasons, or did not fully understand the instructions. Finally, 70.1% (N = 103) of participants were coded 1, 17.0% (N = 25) were coded 2, and 12.9% (N = 19) were coded 3. As in Study 1a, we only included participants coded 1 or 2 (N = 128, 65.6% females, aged 19–65 years, M_age = 29.67 years, SD_age = 12.83 years, 19.2% of vegetarians), and we excluded all participants coded 3.⁴ Finally, participants with missing values for gender (N = 1) and vegetarianism (N = 3) were listwise deleted.

Results

Manipulation checks and preliminary analysis

Participants in the pro-science condition scored significantly higher than the participants in the anti-science on the scale measuring their attitude toward science (M = 3.51, SD = 0.64 vs. M = 3.75, SD = 0.66), t(122) = 2.09, d = .38, 95% CI = [0.02, 0.74], p = .03. The distribution of the injection number was bimodal, and similar to Study 1a (Figure 5, see also Supplemental Material 8). While 28.1% participants refused to begin the task (N = 36), 44.5% fully completed the task through to the end (N = 57). Between 0.8% and 6.3% of the participants stopped at one of the 11 remaining intermediary modalities. Please see Figure 5.

To analyze the relationships between the individual variables and the target behavior, we therefore created two groups, as we did in Study1a: those who stopped before the first injection (i.e., no injections, coded 0) were therefore compared with all the others combined (coded 1).

Primary analysis

A logistic regression analysis was performed to estimate the OR and 95% CI of every selected variable in a single block. The results showed that participants in the pro-science condition (Code 2) administered a higher quantity of the toxic substance than participants in the anti-science condition (Code 1), OR = 2.81, 95% CI = [1.09, 7.22], p = .03. Furthermore, age was inversely related to the administration of the toxic substance to the fish (OR = 0.96, 95% CI = [0.93, 1.00], p = .05), and substance administration was lower among vegetarians (OR = 0.25, 95% CI = [0.08, 0.74], p = .01). The administration of the toxic substance was not significantly related with speciesism, SDO, or empathy. The overall model accounted for 28% of the variance (Nagelkerke’s pseudo R²). Please see Table 2 and Supplemental Material 7.

Table 2.

Logistic Regression Results Contrasting Participants Who Did Not Press the First Button (Coded 0) to All of the Combined Others (Coded 1), Study 1b.

Variable	B	SE	Exp(B)	95% CI	Significance
Age	−0.03	0.01	0.96	[0.93, 1.00]	.050
Gender	−1.04	0.54	0.35	[0.12, 1.03]	.057
SDO	0.73	0.50	2.08	[0.78, 5.57]	.142
Speciesism	0.41	0.41	1.51	[0.67, 3.42]	.316
Vegetarianism	−1.37	0.55	0.25	[0.08, 0.74]	.013
Empathy	0.06	0.43	1.06	[0.45, 2.49]	.878
Science Prime	1.03	0.48	2.81	[1.09, 7.22]	.032
Constant	0.33	2.53	1.39	/	.896

Note. CI = confidence interval; SDO = social dominance orientation.

Discussion

In this study, we showed that participants who had been placed in a scientific mindset were more willing to follow scientific instructions by inflicting pain and harming a target animal involved in a pharmacological experiment. To our knowledge, this represents the first direct behavioral confirmation of the Engaged Followership Theory, which considers that obedient behavior is fully motivated, and is based on an active identification with the scientific enterprise underlying experimental research (Reicher & Haslam, 2011).

However, one may consider that a generalized pro-authoritarian attitude could have been made salient by scientific priming. While such an interpretation would seem on the surface to be inconsistent with surveys showing that pro-scientific attitudes are inversely related to the support of pro-authoritarian institutions and worldviews (Rutjens et al., 2018), additional studies should more directly demonstrate that support for science specifically caused the observed effect, not support for authority in general. Future research should also seek to clarify whether or not the observed link between a pro-science mindset and support for animal experimentation can similarly be observed on a larger scale and in a more diverse and representative sample.

Study 2: Survey Studies on Pro-Scientific Attitude and Support for Animal Experimentation

Study 2a

In the previous study, we experimentally showed that people who were primed toward scientific authority were more inclined to administer a lethal substance to an animal during biomedical research. If this phenomenon is the consequence of the cultural authority of science, it should also be observable outside the laboratory and assessable by direct and explicit verbal measures. To assess the generalizability of our results, we therefore designed a correlational study on a larger sample and tested for cross-sectional relationships between pro-scientific mindset and support for animal experimentation among both medical and pharmacy students (medical group) and physical therapy and midwifery students (paramedical group). The sampling of participants in contrasting disciplinary fields with unequal support for animal experimentation enabled us to investigate the structural relationship between our constructs. We expected to find a positive association between pro-scientific attitudes and support for animal experimentation. Moreover, we also explored how differences in pro-scientific attitudes in these contrasting samples mediated their attitude toward animal experimentation.⁵

Method

Sampling procedure and participants

We benefited from the context of another independent study to distribute a paper-and-pencil survey during a university course. The sample comprised 313 students (73.6% females, aged 19–37 years) taking first-year medicine (N = 157), pharmacy (N = 67), physical therapy (N = 52), and midwifery (N = 37) courses. One participant who did not reply to the gender question (N = 1) was excluded from the analysis. Missing data (<5% for every variable) were imputed means.

A sensitivity analysis which we ran on G*Power indicated (setting an error α rate of .05, a power of .80, 313 participants) that our design allowed us to detect a minimum correlation of r = .16 (Cohen’s d = .31), if it existed, on the link between pro-scientific attitudes and support for animal experimentation.

Measures

A 5-point Likert-type survey was given to participants, with options ranging from 1 (Totally disagree) to 5 (Totally agree) for all the scales. Pro-scientific attitude was measured using two items (“I believe that science can contribute to making the world better” and “I feel at home in the scientific field,” M = 3.16, SD = 0.62, Cronbach’s α = .60). Participants’ attitude toward biomedical animal experimentation was also measured via two items (“When it comes to finding the best treatments for illnesses, doing experiments on animals is justified” and “Sacrificing animals like mice or rats for scientific research is normal”). A 5-point Likert-type survey was proposed, with options ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (totally agree) (M = 1.95, SD = 0.97, Cronbach’s α = .82).

Results

As we expected, support for animal experimentation was significantly related to pro-scientific attitudes (r_Pearson = .27, 95% CI = [0.16, 0.37], p < .001). The relationships were similarly observed among males and females. We then reasoned that knowledge in the fields of medicine and pharmacy was more intrinsically related to animal experimentation than knowledge in the paramedical fields of physical therapy and midwifery. We therefore expected that medicine and pharmacy students would be more supportive of animal experimentation, so we pooled medical and pharmacy students and physical and midwifery students into two separate groups and performed a univariate analysis of variance, with the two groups as independent variables and attitude toward animal experimentation as a dependent variable. Gender and age were also introduced as a control in the model because of the relevance of these variables in the prior literature on animal experimentation (Broida et al., 1993; Ormandy & Schuppli, 2014), as well as the unbalanced distribution of the gender variable in the two groups (medicine–pharmacy, n = 224; physical therapy–midwifery, n = 89). The results showed that animal experimentation was more supported by males than females (M = 2.40, SD = 1.00 vs. M = 1.79, SD = 0.91), F(1, 312) = 13.14, p < .001, d = .41, 95% CI = [0.19, 0.63]. More importantly, the students in the medicine-pharmacy group more strongly supported animal experimentation than those in the physical therapy-midwifery group (M = 2.06, SD = 0.97 vs. M = 1.66, SD = 0.92), F(1, 312) = 6.86, p < .01, d = .30, 95% CI = [0.07, 0.52]. The interaction between participants’ gender and their disciplinary field was not significant, F(1, 312) = 0.24, p = .62.

To explore the possible mediator status of pro-scientific attitude, we then analyzed the relationship between the disciplinary field and attitude toward animal experimentation. We performed multiple regressions in the components paths (Baron & Kenny, 1986) with the “JSmediation” R package (Yzerbyt et al., 2018) and found that the disciplinary field represented a significant predictor of attitude toward animal experimentation (path c), b = 0.390, SE = 0.120, t(311) = 3.24, p < .001, and also of pro-scientific attitude (path a), b = 0.312, SE = 0.077, t(311) = 4.07, p < .001. These results indicate that students on medical courses hold significantly more positive attitudes toward science and animal experimentation than students on paramedical courses. Our analysis also indicated that while controlling for the university course, attitudes toward science still significantly predicted attitudes toward animal experimentation (path b), b = 0.375, SE = 0.086, t(310) = 4.34, p < .001. Controlling for the attitude toward science, our model indicated that the disciplinary field remained a significant predictor of the attitude toward animal experimentation (path c′), b = 0.273, SE = 0.120, t(310) = 2.28, p = .024, confirming a mediation. Upon analyzing the magnitude of this effect using the Monte Carlo sampling method (5,000 iterations), the indirect effect was estimated, b = 0.12, 95% CI = [0.05, 0.20]. Please see Figure 6.

Figure 6.

Path diagram for c. The total effect of disciplinary field on support for animal experiment c′. The indirect effect of disciplinary field on support for animal experiments through pro-scientific attitude.

Discussion

In this study, we showed that students in medical fields endorsed more pro-scientific attitudes than students in paramedical fields, and that this was related to their support for animal experimentation. This finding suggests that pro-scientific attitudes, albeit obviously distinct from support for animal experimentation (as indicated by the low correlation coefficient between the constructs) were linked in a fundamental way to this attitude, and that the experimental results previously observed therefore cannot be reduced to an experimental artifact. Moreover, relying on students in contrasting fields, the finding shows that a pro-scientific attitude seemed to mediate the effect of disciplinary preferences or socialization (see Guimond & Palmer, 1990) on a relevant attitude. However, we did not control for some potential confounds related to ideological variables in this study. Moreover, the sample of medical and paramedical students was specific, and not representative of the general population. Study 2b was consequently devised to assess the solidity of the relationship between support for scientific authority and support for animal experimentation, and to rule out the possibility that this link represents an artifact of ideological overlap.

Study 2b

The aims of this study were twofold. First, we intended to consolidate the previously observed relationship between pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation through a large and representative European sample (N = 31,238). We also aimed to introduce some necessary controls to check for the specificity of the observed relationship. Previous studies have shown that attitudes toward science as well as toward animal experimentation were related to demographic variables (Crettaz von Rotten, 2008; Hagelin et al., 2003), and to ideological factors such as political orientation, authoritarian values, and religion (Furnham & Heyes, 1993; Hagelin et al., 2003). We therefore intended to assess whether or not the observed link between pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation still holds when five key variables are taken into account: age, gender, political orientation, religious attendance, and authoritarian values.

Method

Sampling procedure and participants

The Special Eurobarometer (EB) on Science and Technology served as the data source for this project. This large survey provides representative information on the populations of the 28 European Union member states, as well as on Turkey, Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway (N = 31,238, M_age = 47.35 years, SD_age = 18.23 years, 53.2% female). A multistage random (probability) sampling was applied. All the interviews took place in 2010, face-to-face in people’s homes, and in the appropriate national language. For the sake of not losing information, when missing values were below 10% (which was the case for age, attitude toward science, religious attendance, and attitude toward animal experimentation), we imputed means for items requiring ordinal or continuous answers. Listwise deletion was applied for the remaining variables (gender and political orientation).

We ran a sensitivity analysis with the same design as the previous study, but the adopted sample size indicated that the smallest size that we could detect was of r = .01 (Cohen’s d = .03). Even setting the lower bound to the previous found effect (r = .16), a post hoc analysis indicated that the power of this large sample study was estimated to be 1.

Measures

Pro-scientific attitude

Pro-scientific attitude was measured using eight EB items with a 5-point Likert-type scale, with options ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (totally agree). Example items included the following: “Science should have no limits to what it is able to investigate”; “The benefits of science are greater than any harmful effects it may cause” (M = 3.19, SD = 0.65, Cronbach’s α = .71).

Attitude toward animal experimentation

Attitude toward the use of animals in biomedical research was measured using two EB items with a 5-point Likert-type scale, with options ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (totally agree). Example items included the following: “Scientists should be allowed to do research on animals like mice if it produces new information about health problems”; “Scientists should be allowed to experiment on animals like dogs and monkeys if this can help sort out health problems” (M = 3.39, SD = 1.15, α = .72).

Social and political measures

Political positioning was measured using the following standard question: “In political matters people talk of the ‘left’ and ‘the right’. How would you place your views on this scale?” (1 = Left, 10 = Right; M = 5.33, SD = 2.20). We also measured religious attendance, which is considered as the single most relevant indicator of religious commitment (Gorsuch & McPherson, 1989). Participants were therefore asked the following question: “Apart from weddings or funerals, about how often do you attend religious services?” (1 = never, 8 = more than once a week, M = 3.68, SD = 2.21).

Authoritarian-related values

A single-item measure on value prioritization in relation to opposing the protection of freedom of speech versus fighting crime and terrorism was used as a proxy measure for authoritarianism (see Altemeyer, 1998; Hendricks, 2019): “Which of the following do you think is most important? Protecting freedom of speech and human rights (1) or fighting crime and terrorism (2)” (M = 1.45, SD = 0.49).

Results

All the variables were introduced simultaneously in a single block in a linear multiple regression model.⁶ As is indicated in Table 3, pro-scientific attitude was positively related to support for animal experimentation after controlling for gender, age, religious commitment, political orientation, and authoritarian-related values. Animal experimentation was significantly more strongly endorsed among males, older, religious, right-wing participants, and participants holding authoritarian-related values. The overall model (adjusted R²) accounted for 11.1% of variance.

Table 3.

Linear Regression Model Predicting Support for Animal Experiment (Study 2b).

Variable	B	SE	Beta	t	Significance	95% CI
Age	0.005	0.000	.078	12.44	.001	[0.004, 0.006]
Gender	−0.289	0.014	−.126	−20.15	.001	[−0.31, 0.261]
Pro-scientific attitude	0.498	0.011	.28	45.54	.001	[0.47, 0.519]
Political orientation	0.019	0.003	.037	5.91	.001	[0.013, 0.026]
Authoritarian values	0.056	0.014	−.02	−3.89	.001	[−0.08, 0.020]
Religious attendance	0.009	0.003	.017	2.63	.008	[0.002, 0.015]
Constant	1.98	0.57		34.96	.001	[1.87, 2.09]

Note. CI = confidence interval.

Discussion

In Studies 2a and 2b, we showed that pro-scientific attitude was cross-sectionally related to attitude toward animal experimentation, confirming with the survey studies the results we had experimentally observed in the previous study. The results confirmed that the relationship between pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation was not reducible to confounds such as political orientation, authoritarian-related values, or religious commitment.

Study 3: Testing a Mediation Model

In the previous studies, we showed that a pro-scientific mindset and support for animal experimentation were causally and cross-sectionally related to each other. One possible process explaining this relationship lies in the instrumental mindset that may be inherent to the scientific perspective, and which may numb participants’ attitude to the consequences of experimental practices on animals. Through the objectification process intrinsic to scientific rationality, most of the time animals are considered as tools or “models,” and the expected knowledge outcome is considered sufficient justification for their use. This logic echoes a core dimension of lay utilitarianism: instrumental harm (Kahane et al., 2017). In a recent conceptual analysis of proto-utilitarian tendencies in moral judgment, Kahane et al. (2017) substantiated a fundamental distinction between two dimensions: impartial benevolence, which is a positive dimension of utilitarianism involving “instructing moral agents to sacrifice their own well-being” (p. 134), and instrumental harm, defined as “a willingness to harm and even kill others when this is needed to achieve a better outcome” (p. 135). As an individual difference measure, these authors found that instrumental harm was inversely related to empathic concern and environmental protection, and positively linked to psychopathy (Kahane et al., 2017). It also appears that people who endorse instrumental harm (estimated with the trolley dilemma; see Foot, 1967) are more inclined to consider animals merely as things, with no intrinsic value (Bègue & Laine, 2017).

Our hypothesized relationship between instrumental harm and support for animal experimentation is also derived from previous studies on ethical ideologies (Forsyth, 1980), which have shown that people with low moral idealism (who believe that an action that could harm an innocent other may nonetheless be justified to gain some outcomes) also tend to believe that “scientific concern sometimes justifies potential harm to participants” (Schlenker & Forsyth, 1977; see also Forsyth & Pope, 1984), and tend to be less concerned about the use of animals in scientific experiments (Su & Martens, 2018; Wuensch & Poteat, 1998). Finally, the scientific mindset may numb participants because of the intrinsic effects of statistical reasoning on their perceptions of victims. For example, in a previous study, participants who were induced to follow calculation-based thought (contrasting with a feeling-based mode of thought) were reportedly less generous toward an identifiable victim (Small et al., 2007).

In the present preregistered study (https://osf.io/6tvgz/), we expected that instrumental harm would mediate the link between a pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation.⁷

Method

Sampling procedure and participants

To define the sample size of this study, an a priori calculation on R was carried out, using the “PowerMediation” package and the following guidelines (Perugini et al., 2018). To detect a minimum effect size of r = .10 in each of the three paths of the mediation model, the analysis indicated that a total of 1,550 participants would be needed. The sample of the study comprised 1,598 participants, 50.3% female, aged 20 to 58 years (M_age = 34.8 years, SD_age = 9.55 years). All the participants were recruited by the Toluna Panel and were screened for the following eligibility criteria: aged 18 years or older and French speaking. We imputed means to missing data (<5% for every variable).

Measures

A 5-point Likert-type survey was proposed for all the measures described below, with options ranging from 1 (totally disagree) to 5 (totally agree).

Pro-scientific attitude

Pro-scientific attitude was measured using the five-item scale adapted from Gonzalez-Franco et al. (2018) which had previously been used in Study 1b (M = 3.45, SD = 0.89, Cronbach’s α = .88).

Attitude towards animal experimentation

Attitude toward animal biomedical experiments was measured using the same two items as in Studies 2a and 2b, to which two supplementary items were added to increase the scale’s reliability: “I don’t think that there is anything wrong with using animals in scientific research,” and “Scientists should be allowed to perform any animal experiment without constraining ethical rules if this can benefit medicine” (M = 2.41, SD = 1.08, Cronbach’s α = .86).

Instrumental harm

We used the Instrumental Harm subscale of the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (Kahane et al., 2017), which consists of four items measuring willingness to cause harm to bring about a greater good (e.g., “Sometimes it is morally necessary for innocent people to die as collateral damage—if more people are saved overall,” M = 2.41, SD = 1.04, Cronbach’s α = .86).

Results

Main analysis

We analyzed the relationship between a pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation and the mediating effect of instrumental harm by carrying out a multiple regression analysis on component paths using the JSmediation R package (Yzerbyt et al., 2018). We found that the pro-scientific attitude represented a significant predictor of support for animal experimentation (path c), b = 0.25, SE = 0.03, t(1,596) = 8.39, p < .001, and that it was a significant predictor of instrumental harm (path a), b = 0.18, SE = 0.03, t(1,596) = 6.17, p < .001. We also observed that instrumental harm was a significant predictor of support for animal experimentation (path b), b = 0.50, SE = 0.02, t(1,595) = 21.93, p < .001. Controlling for instrumental harm, we found that pro-scientific attitude remained a significant predictor of support for animal experimentation, but more weakly (path c′), b = 0.16, SE = 0.02, t(1,595) = 6.17, p < .001, thus confirming a mediation (see Figure 7). By analyzing the range of the mediation using the Monte Carlo sampling method (5,000 iterations), an indirect effect was estimated, b = 0.08, 95% CI = [0.06, 0.11].

Figure 7.

Path diagram for c. The total effect of pro-scientific attitude on support for animal experiment c′. The indirect effect of pro-scientific attitude on support for animal experiment through instrumental harm.

Discussion

In this study, we found that a core dimension of lay utilitarianism, instrumental harm (Kahane et al., 2017), mediated the link between a pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation. This result suggests that a pro-scientific attitude was related to the endorsement of a utilitarian arithmetic, which may facilitate the justification of harm to animals. To a certain extent, the objectification inherent to scientific research seems to induce an instrumental view of the object of science itself, even when this involves a sentient being.

General Discussion

Across five independent samples, we have shown that a pro-scientific mindset was related to increased attitudinal and behavioral support for lethal biomedical experiments on animals. The overall triangulated evidence from our studies is consistent with the theoretical prediction that the cultural authority of science shapes an individual’s attitude toward the biomedical use of animals. First, as shown in Study 1, when experimentally primed, a pro-scientific attitude underpinned the commission of a painful treatment to, and the killing of, a sentient animal target. This result, based on a consequential behavioral measure, represents the first direct demonstration of the relevance of the Engaged Followership Theory on obedience (Haslam et al., 2014; Reicher & Haslam, 2011). According to this perspective, which departs from the agentic or blind obedience interpretation (Milgram, 1974), an individual’s active identification with the scientific enterprise underlying research represents a critical cause of the behavior. In our study, individuals who had been primed toward the positive features of science by writing down three things that were important about science, indicating what they liked about science, and stating what they felt they had in common with scientists, were more willing to follow scientific instructions by inflicting pain and killing what they believed to be a target animal involved in a pharmacological experiment. In his own research, Milgram (1974, p. 159) himself considered that “the idea of science as a legitimate social enterprise provides the overarching ideological justification for the experiment.” However, he did not develop this important idea further, and his agentic state perspective departed from the complex notion of legitimacy which he incidentally referred to. We believe that the Engaged Followership Theory introduces a more complex and heuristic understanding of everyday obedience, which should be understood as a dynamic transaction involving individual goals and situational features rather than as a passive conformity. As in previous studies carried out in the Milgram paradigm (e.g., Bègue et al., 2015), we also observed that individual predictors such as SDO or speciesism were relevant factors able to predict behavioral conformity in Study 1a. However, this was not observed in Study 1b. When we aggregated samples of Studies 1a and 1b, they were related to the target behavior.⁸

The observed link between a pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation was dealt with in depth in a cross-sectional study showing that participants in medical fields endorsed a more pro-scientific attitude than those in paramedical fields, which mediated their support for animal experimentation. Moreover, using a large and representative European sample, the specificity and solidity of this link was shown by controlling for potential demographic and ideological confounds.

To clarify the psychological process involved, we then introduced a core dimension of utilitarianism, instrumental harm. Defined as “a willingness to harm and even kill others when this is needed to achieve a better outcome” (Kahane et al., 2017, p. 135), this dimension of lay utilitarianism was conceived as an intermediary psychological variable connecting an individual’s pro-scientific attitude and support for animal experimentation. We observed that this hypothesized mediation was supported by our data in a final study. This result was consistent with the idea that through the scientific process, animals are transformed into commodities to be used to obtain data (Lynch, 1988).

In conclusion, by introducing a new obedience paradigm involving an animal victim, this study refreshes the classical investigation of obedience and provides a psychological view on the contemporary dilemma of animal experimentation. It suggests that the authority assigned by laypeople to science is a powerful source of legitimacy that may in some instances overtake their core human moral principles in relation to how to treat animals.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-psp-10.1177_01461672211039413 – Supplemental material for Sacrificing Animals in the Name of Scientific Authority: The Relationship Between Pro-Scientific Mindset and the Lethal Use of Animals in Biomedical Experimentation

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-psp-10.1177_01461672211039413 for Sacrificing Animals in the Name of Scientific Authority: The Relationship Between Pro-Scientific Mindset and the Lethal Use of Animals in Biomedical Experimentation by Laurent Bègue and Kevin Vezirian in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Jérôme Maisonnasse, Véronique Aubergé, and Alain Quercia for their help at various stages of the research program.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The study was funded in part by University Institute of France (IUF).

ORCID iD

Laurent Bègue

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material is available online with this article.

Notes

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