Joseph P. Redden

Healthy Satiation: The Role of Decreasing Desire in Effective Self-Control

Self-control is typically viewed as a battle between willpower and desire. The authors focus on the desire side of the equation and extol the positive effect of faster satiation that makes unhealthy behaviors less tempting. They demonstrate that consumers higher in trait self-control demonstrate such “healthy” satiation as they satiate faster on unhealthy foods than on healthy foods. In contrast, those with lower self-control fail to consistently show this differential pattern in their satiation rates. This difference for high self-control people can result from faster satiation for unhealthy foods, slower satiation for healthy foods, or both in combination. Moderating and mediating evidence establish that changes in attention to the amount consumed helped account for these effects on the rate of satiation. The resulting differences in satiation influence the ultimate intake of unhealthy foods, underscoring the importance of the contribution made by differential satiation rates to overconsumption and obesity.

Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity

Order and disorder are prevalent in both nature and culture, which suggests that each environ confers advantages for different outcomes. Three experiments tested the novel hypotheses that orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage breaking with tradition and convention—and that both settings can alter preferences, choice, and behavior. Experiment 1 showed that relative to participants in a disorderly room, participants in an orderly room chose healthier snacks and donated more money. Experiment 2 showed that participants in a disorderly room were more creative than participants in an orderly room. Experiment 3 showed a predicted crossover effect: Participants in an orderly room preferred an option labeled as classic, but those in a disorderly room preferred an option labeled as new. Whereas prior research on physical settings has shown that orderly settings encourage better behavior than disorderly ones, the current research tells a nuanced story of how different environments suit different outcomes.

Photographs in Lunch Tray Compartments and Vegetable Consumption Among Children in Elementary School Cafeterias

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The Subjective Sense of Feeling Satiated

The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues. More specifically, while satiation is a function of the actual amount consumed, it also depends on the subjective sense of how much one has recently consumed. We demonstrate the influence of this subjective sense of satiation and show that it is driven by metacognitive cues such as the ease of retrieval of past experiences (Experiments 1 and 2) and can also be directly manipulated by providing a normative standard for consumption quantity (Experiment 3). Our research demonstrates that satiety is not driven solely by the amount and timing of past consumption, thereby establishing the role of higher order metacognitive inferences in satiation and providing insight into how they underlie the construction of satiation.

The Presence of Variety Reduces Perceived Quantity

Against common intuition, we find that variety in an assortment reduces its perceived quantity. Two studies show that people provide larger quantity estimates when shown random patterns of identical colored dots or geometric shapes than when those patterns contain variety. The difference in perceived quantity does not grow as the number of different types increases beyond two, and it disappears if the overall area occupied by the set is made salient through context. We attribute the results to the natural consolidation of identical items into a single Gestalt whole that makes the set seem larger. Two additional studies show that this perceptual influence also causes people to pour more when using varied items to match a sample of food. The article closes with a discussion of the potential implications of these findings for variety research and portion control.

Limited availability reduces the rate of satiation

In general, consumers enjoy products less with repeated consumption. Unfortunately, there are few known ways to slow such satiation. The authors show that consumers satiate more slowly on a product when it is available for consumption only at limited times. Specifically, they find that perceived limited availability made a product more enjoyable, and yet this effect largely emerged only after repeated consumption. The authors attribute this finding to an urge to take advantage of a rare consumption opportunity, which leads people to pay less attention to the quantity consumed and subsequently to experience less satiation. A series of studies establish the effect of perceived limited availability on the rate of satiation, show that it influences how much people eat, provide mediation evidence of the proposed theoretical account, and eliminate the effect by making salient the total amount consumed. The authors conclude with implications of these findings.

Brands as Product Coordinators: Matching Brands Make Joint Consumption Experiences More Enjoyable

People often consume multiple products at the same time (e.g., chips and salsa). Four studies demonstrate that people enjoy such joint consumption experiences more when the products are merely labeled with the same brand (vs. different brands). Process evidence shows that this brand matching effect arises because matching brand labels cue consumers’ belief that the two products were coordinated through joint testing and design to go uniquely well together. This shows that there is no universal answer to which brand a consumer likes the most; it depends on what other brands are consumed with it. More generally, the authors establish that a simple additive model of brand liking cannot fully capture consumption utility and that brands interact and influence enjoyment at the level of the brand combination.

Increasing portion sizes of fruits and vegetables in an elementary school lunch program can increase fruit and vegetable consumption

Increasing portion size can increase childrens consumption of food. The goal of this study was to determine whether increasing the portion sizes of fruits and vegetables in an elementary school cafeteria environment would increase childrens consumption of them. We measured each childs consumption of the fruit and vegetables served in a cafeteria line on a control day (normal cafeteria procedures) and on two intervention days. When we increased the portion size of 3 of the 4 fruits and vegetables by about 50%, children who took those foods increased their consumption of them. Although this was an effective strategy for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption among students who took those foods, many children chose not to take any fruits or vegetables. Further efforts are needed to increase childrens selection and consumption of fruits and vegetables in an environment of competing foods of higher palatability.

Serving first in isolation increases vegetable intake among elementary schoolchildren.

Many people want to eat healthier, but they often fail in these attempts. We report two field studies in an elementary school cafeteria that each demonstrate children eat more of a vegetable (carrots, broccoli) when we provide it first in isolation versus alongside other more preferred foods. We propose this healthy first approach succeeds by triggering one’s inherent motivation to eat a single food placed in front of them, and works even though they have prior knowledge of the full menu available and no real time constraints. Consistent with this theory, and counter to simple contrast effects, an additional lab study found that presenting a food first in isolation had the unique ability to increase intake whether the food was healthy (carrots) or less healthy (M&M’s). Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of this simple intervention in promoting healthier eating, which should interest consumers, food marketers, health professionals, and policy makers.

In Control of Variety. High Self-Control Reduces the Effect of Variety on Food Consumption

The presence of variety increases the quantity of food a person wants and consumes. A recent review of past literature (Remick, Polivy, & Pliner, 2009) concludes that although external factors influence this effect of variety, internal factors do not seem to affect it. We identify general self-control as an internal factor that moderates the effects of variety in food. A series of three studies demonstrates that lower trait self-control makes one more susceptible to the variety effect, showing both greater increases in choice regarding the quantity of consumption and desire for more food in the presence of variety. Compared to those with low self-control, people with high self-control experience reduced enjoyment for a variety of foods following consumption of one food. This increased satiation would serve to diminish the variety effect and facilitate positive health outcomes over time.