Gut Feeling

How many times have you been making decision by gut feeling, which turns out to be wrong?

To be fair, our brains tend to interpret the world within the limitation of sensory perception, which is incredibly biased and doesn't make sense at all. While we think that we are given choices, we have difficulty understanding the fact that we have been coaxed to follow the wrong instinct. Well, if you don't believe me, think about the example of making decisions on what we eat and drink.

Humankind behaviour is such that we have an unspoken tendency to eat (or drink) based on what our senses tell us is the right amount. It seems that every one of us ever since birth, perhaps without even thinking about it, would start crying when hungry and stop eating if full.

I remember studying physiology, and being struck by the tightly regulated feedback loop of satiety signals. Is it true? The literature teems with studies showing how vulnerable we are to bias. Lots. Think, for instance, about the popcorn that moviegoers buy. In a famous psychology study, two groups of people were asked by researchers to rate a movie. As part of the study, each group was given a free bucket of popcorn. One group received an extraordinarily large bucket of popcorn whereas the other got a medium bucket of popcorn. At the same point in time the buckets of popcorn were taken away. Alas, the group with the largest bucket ended up eating a whole lot more popcorn within the same amount of time than the group with the smaller bucket.

What's more, visual cues from the portion size affect not only how much we eat, but how much we drink. I read about an interesting study in which both lean and obese young adults were given a meal of tomato soup in special bowls for lunch. The tricky "self-refilling soup bowls", unbeknownst to them, slowly refilled as their contents were consumed. Believe it or not, these individuals took 73% more than those who consumed tomato soup from normal bowls. Of course, as you might have guessed by now, they did not believe they had consumed more than those who consumed more, nor did they report being more satiated than the other participants.

Oh dear.

No wonder the average dinner plate nowadays is much larger than those used before the 1980's. And yes, as soon as I learn about these funny experiments, I am thinking about bringing my own dinner plate to celebrate the promotion dinner with Bonnie tonight.