Obtain from my SPSS Data Page the following files: KJ.sav, Poffhoff.sav, and Corr_Regr.savBivariate Analysis: Attitudes About Animals Predicted from Misanthropy
One day as I sat in the living room, watching the news on TV, there was a story about some demonstration by animal rights activists. I found myself agreeing with them to a greater extent than I normally do. While pondering why I found their position more appealing than usual that evening, I noted that I was also in a rather misanthropic mood that day. That suggested to me that there might be an association between misanthropy and support for animal rights. When evaluating the ethical status of an action that does some harm to a nonhuman animal, I generally do a cost/benefit analysis, weighing the benefit to humankind against the cost of harm done to the nonhuman. When doing such an analysis, if one does not think much of humankind (is misanthropic), e is unlikely to be able to justify harming nonhumans. To the extent that one does not like humans, one will not be likely to think that benefits to humans can justify doing harm to nonhumans. I decided to investigate the relationship between misanthropy and support of animal rights.
Mike Poteat and I developed an animal rights questionnaire, and I developed a few questions designed to measure misanthropy. One of our graduate students, Kevin Jenkins, collected the data we shall analyze here. His respondents were students at ECU. I used reliability and factor analysis to evaluate the scales (I threw a few items out). All of the items were Likerttype items, on a 5point scale. For each scale, we computed each respondent's mean on the items included in that scale. The scale ran from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). On the Animal Rights scale (AR), high scores represent support of animal rights positions (such as not eating meat, not wearing leather, not doing research on animals, etc.).