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Snackers are Stupid

By cortex on October 11, 2006.

More tales of hilarious heuristics that lead us astray and make us fat:

An appalling example of our mindless approach to eating involved an experiment with tubs of five-day-old popcorn. Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn't eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of other people eating popcorn and the Pavlovian popcorn trigger that is activated when we step into a movie theater.

Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness.

People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn't stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, both groups thought they had eaten about the same amount, and 113 fewer calories on average than they actually had.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but if they gave me a bottomless bowl of Campbell's Tomato Soup, I'd just keep on eating and eating and eating...

Tags
neuroscience

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Stale popcorn. Yummmmmmm...

This reminds me of something. Peter Kramer, IIRC, writes that some drugs (e.g. heroin) have a satiating effect, so their users would, all else being equal, only use enough to reach the desired state, while some other drugs (e.g. cocaine or amphetamines) are not satiating but rather their use provokes the desire for more and their users will rapidly run through all the drug available.

So what we are being told is that stale popcorn is like cocaine? The sound of crunchy popcorn excites the desire for more, more, more?

(Not entirely joking, I'm wondering if this applies to all types of food or rather only to certain types: snack food types, as your title suggests.)

I guess I don't have to feel so bad about chowing down during Taladega Nights. The big box was only 25 cents more!!!