Sharing food can reduce the perceived fattening potential of a consumption episode without biasing caloric estimates, even when explicit caloric information is provided

Your Fries are Less Fattening than Mine: How Food Sharing Biases Fattening Judgments Without Biasing Caloric Estimates. Nükhet Taylor  Theodore J. Noseworthy. Journal of Consumer Psychology, December 17 2020. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1214

Abstract: Food sharing has become quite popular over the last decade, with companies offering food options specifically designed to be shared. As the popularity has grown, so too has concerns over the potential negative impact on consumer health. Despite companies’ explicit claims to the contrary, critics maintain that food sharing may be encouraging excessive caloric intake. The current article provides the first systematic exploration of why this may be happening. Three main and two supplementary studies suggest that food sharing reduces perceived ownership, which, in turn, leads people to mentally decouple calories from their consequence. Thus, sharing can reduce the perceived fattening potential of a consumption episode without biasing caloric estimates. This phenomenon persists even when explicit caloric information is provided, and it applies to both healthy and unhealthy foods. Importantly, we establish a relevant downstream consequence by illustrating that people tend to subsequently select calorie‐dense foods after underestimating the fattening potential of a shared consumption episode. A roadmap for future research and practical implications are discussed.

General Discussion

The current work investigated how food sharing impacts health‐related judgments. Our findings revealed that sharing is not biasing caloric estimates but is biasing how consumers construe the consequence of their caloric intake. Specifically, food appears less fattening when it is shared (study 1). We replicated these findings with both healthy and unhealthy food and with explicit calorie information (study 2). Thus, rather than a motivational mechanism that hinges on unhealthy food, sharing is causing a general decoupling of calories and their consequence. Importantly, reduced fattening judgments also reduced the possibility that consumers will correct for the extra caloric intake in subsequent choice (study 3). All studies confirmed that reduced perceived ownership underscored these results. Thus, elevating perceived ownership elevated fattening judgments (study 3). Two supplementary studies supported these conclusions (MDA: Appendix S1 pp. 14–20). Finally, a Bayesian SPM provided strong evidence in favor of sharing impacting fattening judgments and not caloric estimates.

This work represents a cautionary note for public policymakers and for companies promoting food sharing. When introducing share‐size snacks, Mars‐Wrigley claimed that food sharing may help weight maintenance by facilitating portion control (Mars, 2017). Our findings suggest that food sharing may be encouraging excessive caloric intake by leading consumers to underestimate the fattening potential brought on by shared food consumption.

Exploration and Future Research

In the spirit of a research report, we explored other ways in which sharing may impact perceptions. Specifically, while caloric estimates were not impacted, related factors such as perceived size and/or healthiness may have been impacted. However, we were not able to support these possibilities (MDA: Appendix S1 pp. 4–7). We also considered that people may feel less responsible over their consumption when sharing food. We did not find this to be the case either (MDA: Appendix S1 p. 4). Nevertheless, researchers can build on these attempts. For instance, although sharing did not bias the perceived healthiness of stereotypically healthy/unhealthy foods, it could bias perceptions of a health‐ambiguous food (e.g., pasta salad). Similarly, although sharing did not alter size perceptions, it may be that sharing elevates the desire for larger food options (Taylor, Noseworthy, & Pancer, 2019).

Future work can pinpoint why lower perceived ownership makes caloric intake seem inconsequential. One possibility relates to mental accounting. Extant work has shown that consumers use mental accounts to keep track of both monetary expenses (Thaler, 1985) and daily caloric budgets (Khare & Innman, 2009). Thus, it may be that consumers do not include calories from shared consumption in their caloric budget because they believe these calories do not belong to them. A related principle in categorization theory that fits the mental accounting lens could be how psychological budgets interact. If consumers see calorie budgets similar to financial budgets, sharing in one may lead people to compensate for a biased shortfall in the other—re: fluid compensation (Taylor & Noseworthy, 2020). Another possibility relates to egocentric categorization theory (Weiss & Johar, 2016), which shows that people assimilate to products they own, and contrast products they do not own. This may explain why people decouple calories from their consequences to the self. A final possibility is how people mentally construe (un)owned objects. People perceive things to be of lesser consequence when they are psychologically distant (Polman et al., 2018). A similar mindset mechanism could be contributing to our findings.

Future work can investigate the implications of our findings for other collaborative consumption domains. One area is household consumption, whereby typically one person purchases the food consumed by others (Belk, 2010).

Future work may also explore how external cues influence the tendency to share food. One intriguing question is how sharing is impacted when consumers are faced with cues of contagious disease, such as during flu season or during a health pandemic (e.g., Covid‐19). Extant work suggests two plausible accounts. The first one is that contagious disease cues elicit disgust and a desire to self isolate (Galoni & Noseworthy, 2015; Lerner & Keltner, 2000), which may dampen food sharing in general. The second one is that disease cues reduce the desire to interact with the unfamiliar, but elevate the desire to interact with the familiar (Galoni, Carpenter, & Rao, 2020). The end result may be a lower tendency to share with distant others such as acquaintances and colleagues, but greater tendency to share with close others such as family members and significant others. Future work may expand on these possibilities.

Finally, a major limitation of the current work is that the consequences of food sharing were examined via vignettes. We strongly encourage future research to examine actual consumption in a real‐world setting. This would not only establish the ecological validity of the current findings but would also provide a richer understanding of the social dynamics behind food sharing. Certainly, more work is needed in this area.