Title
Seeing is misbelieving: Consumers wrongly believe that unhealthy food tastes better when there is more of it
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Abstract
Recent studies have shown that people can believe that unhealthy foods taste better, even if healthy and unhealthy foods are equally as tasty. Specifically, when tasty and unhealthy foods are frequent in one context but rare in another, people perceive unhealthy foods to taste better, even if health and taste are unrelated. Given that people often consume food in one context, the current study investigated whether false beliefs about the health-taste relationship in foods can also occur in just one single context, in which either healthy or unhealthy foods are predominant, when there is no contrasting context where the respective other food is predominant. In two experiments (N = 342), we presented participants with pictures of meals from a single context and varied the frequency of healthy and unhealthy foods between participants. Although healthy and unhealthy foods tasted equally as good, participants believed that (un)healthy foods tasted better when there were more of them. This research demonstrates that health-taste beliefs might be changed by increasing the relative frequency of healthy foods in the environment overall, not by just offering some healthy and tasty foods.
Keywords
FoodHealthTasteUnhealthy=tasty beliefIllusory correlationsPseudocontingencies
Object type
Language
English [eng]
Persistent identifier
https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:2084953
Appeared in
Title
Appetite
Volume
197
ISSN
0195-6663
Issued
2024
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Date issued
2024
Access rights
Rights statement
© 2024 The Authors

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