A study has revealed why people eat bad food out of habit, and how they can combat mindless eating
A study has revealed why people eat bad food out of habit, and how they can combat mindless eating.
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In an ingenious experiment, USC researchers gave people about to enter a movie theatre a bucket of either just-popped, fresh popcorn or stale, week-old popcorn.
Moviegoers who didn't usually eat popcorn at the movies ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn. The week-old popcorn just didn't taste as good.
But moviegoers who indicated that they typically had popcorn at the movies ate about the same amount of popcorn whether it was fresh or stale.
In other words, for those in the habit of having popcorn at the movies, it made no difference whether the popcorn tasted good or not.
"When we've repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and make us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present," lead author David Neal, who was a psychology professor at USC when the research was conducted and now heads a social and consumer research firm, said.
The study has important implications for understanding overeating and the conditions that may cause people to eat even when they are not hungry or do not like the food.
"People believe their eating behaviour is largely activated by how food tastes. Nobody likes cold, spongy, week-old popcorn," said corresponding author Wendy Wood, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at USC.
"But once we've formed an eating habit, we no longer care whether the food tastes good. We'll eat exactly the same amount, whether it's fresh or stale," she stated.
In another movie theatre experiment, the researchers tested a simple disruption of automatic eating habits. Once again using stale and fresh popcorn, the researchers asked participants about to enter a film screening to eat popcorn either with their dominant or non-dominant hand.
Using the non-dominant hand seemed to disrupt eating habits and cause people to pay attention to what they were eating.
When using the non-dominant hand, moviegoers ate much less of the stale than the fresh popcorn, and this worked even for those with strong eating habits.
"It''s not always feasible for dieters to avoid or alter the environments in which they typically overeat," Wood said.
"More feasible, perhaps, is for dieters top actively disrupt the established patterns of how they eat through simple techniques, such as switching the hand they use to eat," she added.
The study has been published in the current issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
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