Instrumental harm toward animals in a milgram-like experiment in France: The role of nonpathological personality traits

In most of the studies on animal cruelty, animal harm is considered as evidence of mental illness, a sign of psychopathology, or at least, of some emotional deficits. We propose to widen the perspective on animal harm and to focus on an institutional context of violence toward animals: the research laboratory. In an experiment modeled on Milgram's methods, participants were required to incrementally administer a noxious chemical substance to a large (20-inch) fish as a part of a learning experiment, leading to the death of the animal. However, the fish was actually a biomimetic robot that swam in a tank across the room from the participant, who believed it was real. Participants were informed that the toxic substance would be painful and lethal at higher doses for the animal. We showed that most of the participants continued until the end of the experiment and killed the fish, and that inter-individual differences predicted the maximum dose administrated. Males, and participants with low empathy, high speciesism, and a high social dominance orientation went significantly further. These results indicate that nonpathological personality factors are relevant predictors of animal harm in an institutional context.