“They’re Eating Our Pets!”: When Disgust and Perceived Cruelty Combine to Heighten Prejudice

Accusations that foreigners are “eating pets” tap into deep fears of impurity and cruelty. Despite the dark history of such moralized disgust and evidence that purity- and harm-based emotions can intensify bias, little experimental work has directly tested how these processes jointly shape prejudice. Across two main-text experiments and one supplemental replication (N = 2,710, U.S.), we tested whether hostility is greatest when cultural outgroups are portrayed as consuming meat that elicits both visceral (purity-related) disgust and moral concern. A pretest confirmed that dog meat evoked the highest moral concern, rat the highest contamination-related appraisals, and cow was neutral, while Study 2 substituted monkey to test generalization. Prejudice and punitive intent were strongest for morally protected animals (dog, monkey), moderate for rat, and lowest for cow. Visceral disgust showed more consistent association with bias, whereas compassion played a more limited role. Invoking disgust and perceived cruelty can become a potent trigger of hostility toward cultural outgroups.