This research investigated whether people change their food preferences and eating behavior in response to health-based social norms. One hundred twenty participants rated a series of healthy and unhealthy food images. After each rating, participants sometimes viewed a rating that ostensibly represented the average rating of previous participants. In fact, these average ratings were manipulated to convey a particular social norm. Participants either saw average ratings that favored healthy foods, favored unhealthy foods, or did not see any average ratings. Participants then re-rated those same food images after approximately ten minutes and again three days later. After the norm manipulation, participants were given the chance to take as many M&Ms as they wanted. Participants exposed to a healthy social norm consistently reported lower preferences for unhealthy foods as compared to participants in the other two conditions. This preference difference persisted three days after the social norm manipulation. However, health-based social norm manipulations did not influence the amount of M&Ms participants took. Although health-based social norm manipulations can influence stated food preferences, in this case they did not influence subsequent eating behavior.
Citation: Templeton EM, Stanton MV, Zaki J (2016) Social Norms Shift Preferences for Healthy and Unhealthy Foods. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0166286. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0166286
Editor: Jacobus van Wouwe, TNO, NETHERLANDS
Received: February 11, 2016; Accepted: September 13, 2016; Published: November 18, 2016
Copyright: © 2016 Templeton et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All data and analysis scripts can be found at the Github repository here: https://github.com/emtempleton/FoodPaper.git.
Funding: This work was funded in part by the United States Army grant #W911NF-14-1-0001. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
