Naming a chicken and telling about its favourite habits is enough to make preschoolers eat poultry less often. This effect translates into verbal declarations and real decisions when composing a meal, but culinary preferences still most often win over empathy, according to a new paper by researchers from SWPS University.
Reducing meat in your daily diet has benefits, as it is associated with lower health risks, enhanced environmental sustainability, and the reduced suffering of animals.
Previous research has shown that identifying individuals by name represents a cost-effective yet potent psychological intervention that elicits favourable attitudes toward both humans and animals. In human relations, the identification of individual victims, often referred to as the Identifiable Victim Effect (IVE), increases willingness to help and promotes actual prosocial behaviour, such as greater charitable donations. Learning an animal's name can also change attitudes towards it, but it has not yet been established whether this affects actual meat consumption, and to what extent it applies to different animal species. Researchers from SWPS University decided to look for answers to these questions. They described the results in the paper " Naming the one to save the many: The effect of animal identifiability on children's reduced meat preference ”, published in the scientific journal Appetite .
Is Lelek the chicken unique?
Preschool children (5-6 years old) were invited to participate in the study. In the first experiment, the researchers wanted to replicate the results obtained in 2024, showing that identifying animals and perceiving them as similar to humans makes children want to befriend the animal and declare their reluctance to eat its meat. The researchers also checked whether children would be willing to eat meat sourced from other chickens and different animal species.
During the experiment, children were presented with the silhouette of a chicken. In the identifiability group, the bird was given the name Lelek and a short description of its individual characteristics, including favourite delicacies and everyday habits in the yard. In the control group, children received the same information, but without a name and presented as a general description of the entire species. Then, the children were asked to build their own toy sandwiches using the provided elements, including artificial slices of cheese, tomato, as well as poultry and pork cold cuts.
In the second experiment, the children were divided into three groups. The first group learned about Chico the chicken as a unique individual (similarly to the first experiment); Chico the chicken was introduced to the second group as one of many similar representatives of its species, while the control group received general information about chickens. Children were asked, among other things, whether they perceived these animals as unique or similar to other chickens.
From the name to the decision on the plate
It turned out that in the case of children who do not like meat much, learning the individual history of the chicken (its name, favourite food and everyday habits) made the children less likely to declare their willingness to eat this particular animal, and when composing their own toy sandwiches, they chose noticeably fewer slices of poultry cold cuts.
This means that the way the narrative about the animal is built plays an important role in shaping children's attitudes. Presenting the chicken as a unique individual with distinctive characteristics was more effective in limiting the choice of meat than emphasising that it was the same as the rest of the coup. Building a relationship with such an individual allowed to extend a caring attitude to other, previously anonymous birds of the same species.
Children's empathy has its limits
However, warm feelings towards a representative of one species do not extend to all animals. While the bond with a chicken decreased the participants' appetite for poultry, it did not affect their perception of pork meats. This may mean that the mechanism works within one species, but does not translate into a general reluctance to eat meat.
In addition, the effect of reduced willingness to eat meat occurred only in children who had little or moderate interest in eating meat from the beginning. In the case of children who definitely liked to eat meat, learning the name and characteristics of the animal did not influence their eating decisions.
"Save one to protect many" mechanism
A key finding of the experiment concerns the role of an animal’s uniqueness. Presenting a chicken as an individual with its own name and truly distinctive traits was more effective at discouraging the choice of poultry meat than presenting a chicken that had a name but was otherwise similar to other chickens. This implies that giving an animal a name helps a child view it as a being worthy of protection, provided that the name serves to distinguish the animal as unique. This sense of uniqueness encourages children to extend their concern to other, anonymous members of the same species , emphasizes one of the study authors, psychologist Aleksandra Rabinovitch, PhD, from the SWPS University Faculty of Psychology in Sopot.
The results of the study open up new possibilities for shaping healthy habits in children. Using individualised animal characters, for instance, in preschool education, could help promote diets richer in plant-based foods. At the same time, the researchers emphasise that successfully changing children's diets requires taking their individual taste preferences and home habits into account.
Appetite
Experimental study
People
Naming the one to save the many: The effect of animal identifiability on children's reduced meat preference
8-Aug-2026
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.