Testing and Extending the Pets as Ambassadors Hypothesis: The Role of Contact with Pets and Recategorization Processes in Predicting Positive Attitudes toward Animals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract According to the pets as ambassadors hypothesis ( Serpell & Paul, 1994 ), contact with pets can promote more positive attitudes toward animals in general and serve as a springboard toward concerns for a broader range of animals. Building on intergroup contact theory and the common ingroup identity model, the current research aimed to test and extend the pets as ambassadors hypothesis as well as investigate its underlying mechanisms. Specifically, two studies aimed to test whether contact with pets – as a specific type of cross-group friendship – can predict more positive attitudes toward animals in general through recategorization and self-expansion processes. Extending the pets as ambassadors hypothesis, we also verified if inclusion of a favorite pet in the self could predict identification with nature. Two correlational studies conducted at the University of Quebec in Montreal tested these associations. In Study 1 ( N =148 university students, 109 women; mean age of 24.96 years old; 103 pet owners), mediation analyses revealed that contact with pets predicted greater moral concern toward animals and lower speciesism; these links were mediated by the inclusion of animals in the self. Study 2 ( N =157 university students, 108 women; mean age of 23.26 years old; 95 pet owners) extended these findings by showing that inclusion of a favorite pet in the self predicted identification with nature; this link was mediated by inclusion of animals in the self. Categorizing humans and animals into the same superordinate group also mediated the associations between inclusion of a favorite pet in the self, on the one end, and inclusion of animals in the self as well as identification with nature on the other. These results stress the importance of recategorization processes in our relations with animals and with nature. Furthermore, they reveal the applicability of the intergroup contact, cross-group friendship, and common ingroup identity models to the realm of human-animal relations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".