Might an overweight waitress make you eat more? How the body type of others is sufficient to alter our food consumption

By Brent McFerran, Darren W. Dahl, Gavan J. Fitzsimons, Andrea C. Morales. 2010

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates how people's food choices can be shaped by the body type of others around them. Using a professionally constructed obesity prosthesis, we show that the body type of a (confederate) server in a taste test study was sufficient to alter both the quantity (Experiment 1) and specific choices (Experiment 2) participants made but that chronic dieters and non-dieters exhibited opposite effects. While non-dieters ate more snacks when the server was thin, dieters ate more when the server was heavy. Dieters were also more persuaded by a heavy (vs. a thin) server, choosing both a healthy and unhealthy snack more often when she recommended it to them. We suggest these results may be attributable to identification with the server.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38d8b9fd4df3e0b9e4081f2f8aa99924f962a846

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Citations in the corpus

Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior (2011, unknown): “, eating, exercise) that mostly confirm our findings is quite diverse, including everything from observational studies, to natural experiments, to de novo experiments, to twin studies that account for genetic similarity, to clever studies involving electronic monitoring of interactions [24, 96-109].”
Social modeling of eating: a review of when and why social influence affects food intake and choice. (2015, unknown): “…finding that has emerged across multiple studies is that modeling appears to be enhanced when individuals are similar, either in terms of sex (Conger et al., 1980), weight (Hermans et al., 2008; Johnston, 2002; McFerran et al., 2010a; Rosenthal & McSweeney, 1979) or age (Hendy & Raudenbush, 2000).”
How Images of Other Consumers Influence Subsequent Taste Perceptions (2013, background): “Second, existing research on social norms and food consumption has focused on the role that others play in influencing food choices and amount consumed (e.g., McFerran et al. 2010a, b).”
Identity‐Based Motivation: Implications for Health and Health Disparities (2014, background): “, 2009), dieter (Irmak, Vallen, & Robinson, 2011; McFerran et al., 2010) and even a “Green” environmentalist identity (Schuldt & Schwarz, 2010).”
Which Healthy Eating Nudges Work Best? A Meta-Analysis of Field Experiments (2018, background): “This is particularly the casewhen these injunctions are made verbally by the waiters or the “lunch ladies,”and they create strong affective responses (Herman et al. 2003, McFerran et al. 2010).”
An integrative review of sensory marketing: Engaging the senses to affect perception, judgment and behavior (2012, background): “In their excellent overview of audition, Meyers-Levy, Bublitz, and Peracchio (2010) expound on the effects of sound symbolism (the sound of the word affects the perception of the object it represents—Yorkston & Menon, 2004), the language used (first or second language of bilinguals—see Krishna & Ahl”
The red sneakers effect: Inferring status and competence from signals of nonconformity. (2014, background): “Consumers are motivated to behave like those around them and make choices that are consistent with their in-group due to a need to increase affiliation and express desired identities (Bearden, Netemeyer, and Teel 1989; Escalas and Bettman 2003, 2005; McFerran et al. 2010a, 2010b).”