Re:On ‘Plant-Based’
by layer8 on Thursday December 29, 2022 @11:55AM
(#34174651)
Yeah, but the non-rational parts of the brain aren’t good with negation. Reading “animal”, even when suffixed by “-free”, the brain feels it doesn’t want that thing with “animal” on it. Better give it something with “plant” on it.
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Why? "Animal-free" means that animals are free, not taking part in the food.
It’s a priming effect. Once your brain sees “animal”, it associates the product or label with animals right away, before higher-level linguistic processing, an association which then has to be undone by the “-free”. That undoing is time-delayed and incomplete.
One common analogy is how when someone says “don’t think of X”, it’s hard to not think of X.