The Impact of Beliefs About Cross-Species Disease Transmission on Perceived Safety of Wild Game Meat: Building a Psychological Approach to Meat Safety
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ObjectivesMeat safety is a central concern for public health. However, there is limited research on the psychological factors that influence people’s perception of meat safety. Such a psychological perspective may benefit meat science by adding understanding of how people interact with meats and how to tailor meat safety interventions to properly convey safety concerns. We will examine the psychology underlying perceptions of safety in wild game, a critical problem in global public health. Wild game provides a popular source of meat throughout the world. In equatorial regions, wild game meat is a key source of nutrients and may be the only meat sources for some rural populations. Consuming wild game is also associated with increased risk of zoonosis and has been implicated in a number of emerging diseases, including Ebola and HIV. Currently, there is limited research on how people judge the risks associated with consuming meat from wild game. According to cognitive psychology, knowing that many animals can catch a disease increases people’s beliefs that other animals are susceptible to the disease. We hypothesize that individual beliefs about the safety of eating wild game meat will associate with beliefs about the likelihood of cross-species disease transmission.Materials and MethodsParticipants (n = 210) were recruited from U.S., Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the Bahamas using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and completed an online survey asking them to rate the safety of wild game meat sources (mammals and birds), judge the likelihood of disease transmission between pairs of wild animals, and provide demographic information. We analyzed mean differences in perceived safety between animals and how average mammal-mammal and mammal-bird disease transmission beliefs related to perceived safety.ResultsPerceived meat safety was highest for common game (deer, rabbits, boar, and bear), and lower for less common game (squirrels, cats, dogs, raccoons, monkeys, and bats). A linear mixed effects model indicated significant variability in perceived safety across animals, F(91881) = 242.3, p 0.25). For common game, mammal-bird disease transmission beliefs were negatively associated with perceived meat safety, t(207) = 3.397, p < 0.001, but mammal-mammal transmission beliefs were not.ConclusionTo the extent that participants believed it was possible for common game mammals to become infected with bird diseases, they perceived mammal meat to be less safe. These results are consistent with a “premise diversity” effect from cognitive psychology and suggest that people believe diseases are more transmittable to humans via wild game meat if they are transmittable across a wide range of species. These results suggest that interventions highlighting species-to-species disease transmission risk may help to increase awareness of the dangers that wild game meat can pose to public health. Because the results were primarily limited to commonly eaten wild game, it is important for future studies to assess whether our findings generalize to safety perceptions for common livestock meat sources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".