Not Eating Enough Overcoming Underconsumption of Military Operational Rations (1995) / Chapter Skim
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20 Social Facilitation and Inhibition of Eating
20 Social Facilitation and Inhibition of Eating
Pages 373-392
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National Academy Press Social Facilitation and Inhibition of Eating John M cle Castro' INTRODUCTION The human is a social animal whose behavior is profoundly affected by social influences.
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If the other person is blindfolded and the subject knows there will be no interaction, then social facilitation does not occur (Cottrell et al., 1968~. SOCIAL FACILITATION OF FOOD INTAKE Simple behaviors tend to be increased in magnitude by social influences.
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A good meal tastes better if we eat it in the company of friends." Food intake by humans was looked upon as fundamentally different from animals, that is, animals feed and humans dine! Researchers believed that "in man, the time of meals, as well as the choice of foods, their presentation, the cooking style, and the quantities presented...escape the direct control exerted in animals" (Bellisle, 1979, p.
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Hence, in the laboratory, the food intake of a subject can be profoundly influenced by the food intake of a companion even when the subject is extremely hungry. The snack intake of a subject appears to be affected not only by the intake but also by the nature of the companion.
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Most importantly from the standpoint of investigating social influences on food intake, they also record the number and nature of other people eating with them. Self-report methods in general, and specifically the diet diary technique, have been believed to be inaccurate and unreliable.
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in spite of the error attests to the robustness of the phenomena observed and indicates that the technique is sensitive enough for most research purposes. The Presence of Other People at Meals To investigate whether social facilitation influences people's intake outside of the laboratory, this author reanalyzed the diet diary data that were collected in prior studies (de Castro, 1987a, b; 1990; l99]
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Hence, not only are meals eaten with other people larger than meals eaten alone, but the greater the number of people present, the more that is ingested. To investigate whether the influence of the presence of other people was primary or secondary to other salient influences on meal size, multiple linear regressions were performed that used the number of people present as a predictor of meal size along with four other predictors that are known to be related to the amount eaten at a meal: time of day (de Castro, 1987b)
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This author investigated these potential artifactual explanations by isolating meals that occurred under specific conditions and demonstrated that, although the covariances exist, they do not account for the social correlation. Strong, positive, and significant correlations between meal size and the number of other people present social correlations were found separately for meals eaten during breakfast, lunch, or dinner; eaten in restaurants, at home, or elsewhere; accompanied by alcohol intake or without alcohol; eaten only as snacks or only as meals (de Castro et al., 1990~; or eaten as meals during weekdays or during weekends (de Castro, 1991a)
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, or psychological (de Castro and Elmore, 1988) variables, which suggests that the most salient factor associated with short-term food intake in humans is social facilitation The orderliness of the effect is also remarkable.
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Hence social facilitation of food intake is an orderly, lawful process that is similar to other social facilitation phenomena and likewise can be fairly well described by a power function. Social Facilitation and Increased Intake Even with all this evidence, because of the observational nature of the research, it is not acceptable to conclude that the presence of other people is the cause of the increased intake.
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Using the data obtained with the diet diary technique this author demonstrated that females eat more with males than with females as predicted by the hypothesis. However, contrary to the predictions of the hypothesis, males exhibited social facilitation, increasing intake, regardless of whether they ate with males or females (de Castro, 1994~.
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Meals were separated according to the type of companion present with the subject: friend, family, spouse, work associate, or other. Average meal sizes for meals eaten with and without each of these companion types and meals eaten alone are presented in Figure 20-5.
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M de Castro, Family and friends produce greater social facilitation of food intake than other comparisons, 445055, 1994, with kind permission from Elsevier Science Ltd., The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington 0X5 1GB, U.K.
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Hence, the time extension hypothesis is also a viable explanation of social facilitation of food intake. Although the theories are highly speculative, it is possible that both disinhibition and time extension occur and account for social facilitation of intake.
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Hence, the best current available explanation for social facilitation involves a general time extension working in conjunction with a companion-specific disinhibition. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Social facilitation of food intake has a number of practical consequences.
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The only naturalistic data comes from diet diary studies which indicate that when females eat with a higher intake, male partner, an increment in food intake occurs. Again, the research is simply too sparse and lacks investigations of the long-term effectiveness of modeling as a facilitator of intake to reach any firm conclusions.
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: 1133-1144. 1993b Age related changes in natural spontaneous food intake and hunger in humans.
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Kreitzman 1986 Spontaneous human meal patterns are related to preprandial factors regardless of natural environmental constraints. Physiol.
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1979 A naturalistic study of social influences on meal size among moderately obese and nonobese subjects. Psychosom.
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1964 Social facilitation offeeding behavior in the domestic chick.
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