Diners Tend To Eat More If Their Companions Are Overweight 126
BarbaraHudson writes: A University of Illinois study (abstract) that shows that people tend to eat more in the presence of an overweight person. From the article: "The test involved a sample of 82 college coeds who were observed helping themselves to a simple pasta and salad meal. Each of the coeds were themselves of normal weight. The students first required to watch what they believed was a fat woman serving herself some of the food. The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit.
After observing the "corpulent" woman serve herself, the students were allowed to come forward and serve themselves pasta and salad. On average, the coeds each served themselves more pasta than the "fat" woman had selected while taking less salad than she did. When the same study was performed with the actress appearing sans the fat suit, researchers observed that students ended up eating more salad than pasta. The conclusion was simple: people may consume more unhealthy food and eat less healthy food when in the presence of an overweight person." As anyone on a diet will tell you, a waist is a terrible thing to mind. Weight control is a lot more complex than the article makes it seem, though some will welcome the opportunity to blame someone else.
After observing the "corpulent" woman serve herself, the students were allowed to come forward and serve themselves pasta and salad. On average, the coeds each served themselves more pasta than the "fat" woman had selected while taking less salad than she did. When the same study was performed with the actress appearing sans the fat suit, researchers observed that students ended up eating more salad than pasta. The conclusion was simple: people may consume more unhealthy food and eat less healthy food when in the presence of an overweight person." As anyone on a diet will tell you, a waist is a terrible thing to mind. Weight control is a lot more complex than the article makes it seem, though some will welcome the opportunity to blame someone else.
monkey see monkey do (Score:1)
Give money grant money! Give! Give!
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Those are auto functions deeper than the Animal brain. They also include instruction sets for your organs, in case you think sleeping,breathing and shitting will get you to the next day.
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Your logic is flawed. Alpha animals do not allow lesser animals to feed before they do.
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Ever watched a pack of dogs? The alpha may get the biggest chunk, but , the kill is shared and it is done so by the same ol tug'o war skirmish necessary due to dogs lack of cutlery skills and their lack of thumbs. Eat, before it is eaten. As long as the dog can hold on to the piece he is holding, he can eat, this can be acted upon by another dog who dependent on his status to that individual; will either tug with him or fight him off. It takes the pack to feed from the alphas kill, while the alpha may "take
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Re:monkey see monkey do (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post is an amalgamation of unfalsifiable nonsense. Humans aren't dogs; we didn't typically immediately eat everything we killed. They took it back to the cave/shelter/whatever and (once we had fire) cooked it and shared it with the non-hunters. Yeah the tribal leader(s) probably got to eat more or better parts of the animal, but, unlike with dogs, robbing him of this by eating it first would probably result in some long-term consequences. And for a large part of our history -- maybe most of it -- we weren't even primarily hunters at all. Look at the modern diet of chimpanzees. Your speculation also does not account for eating less salad -- why not simply eat more of everything? And as far as eating quicker, that's not even in the summary (and probably not the article either, but I don't care enough to check). You seem to have just pulled that out of an orifice not used for eating.
My speculation is It's probably more a case of mirroring. People mirror those around them (and you can speculate on why exactly this is the case as well if you want), and mirroring a fat person means -- at least in someone's mind -- eating less healthy and more calorie-dense food. But that's just unfalsifiable speculation on my part. All we know for sure is that people do it. And that's thanks to this study.
Also? Not going to a university because you don't like one study by one professor in one department is just too stupid for further comment.
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No ,but it is also an example of the basic functions of OUR brains, which is where the overloaded stimulus goes once our capacities for conscious thought have topped out.We call it the animal brain, which all animals posess no matter how smart or dumb their species. Caveboys are an example of a layer of thought above that, Iron age man organized conscious thought even better and so on. Modern man doesn't multitask infinitely, he load balances destructively.
We, as people do more and more mindlessly because o
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I know a Chinese buffet w/salad , sushi, fresh produce and also the same stir fried, tempura laden, sweet n sour goo that you see the heifers shoving in their grind hole. Not many can resist the lure of the ginger, duck sauce and chili oil , siren call.
It would be interesting to observe a health club eating alongside the triplechin set.
America = snowball (Score:1)
So obesity in America is a snowball effect and cannot be stopped.
The cure for obesity! (Score:1)
An advertising campaign: fat women eating salad.
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Re: The cure for obesity! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: The cure for obesity! (Score:4, Insightful)
Aspartame is one of the few substances that has been analysed to death, and we know it is quickly metabolised into 3 parts that are also found in many other sources of food that we wouldn't think twice of consuming. We don't know nearly as much about herbal teas, for instance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.... no matter how hard you try to make Aspartame look more innocent than bunny rabbits and fluffy kittens It still creeps me out that Donald Rumsfeld had a hand in getting it FDA approved and bringing it to market.
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Aspartame is one of the few substances that has been analysed to death, and we know it is quickly metabolised into 3 parts that are also found in many other sources of food that we wouldn't think twice of consuming. We don't know nearly as much about herbal teas, for instance.
It also results in glucose intolerance [iflscience.com].
Regardless of how we think the body processes it, it's pretty hard to argue with the evidence on what effects it actually has.
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> One can of Diet Coke saves 139 kcal compared to a regular Coke. Not a ton, but still worth saving.
That's not taking into account the after-effects of drinking saccarine or aspartame. Over time, you save nothing by going diet soda, you gain weight instead!
2010 Yale Study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/ [nih.gov]
2011 Purdue Study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21424985 [nih.gov]
IMHO: Much better would be drinking regular water or iced tea instead of regular coke.
Re:The cure for obesity! (Score:5, Informative)
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why not just have a glass of water, and mail a check to the coca cola bottling company separately?
That's called Dasani.
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Why do I suddenly want to play Kerble Space program?
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So obesity in America is a snowball effect and cannot be stopped.
Look at photographs from the sixties and seventies of Americans or even earlier. Normal people.
From the eighties onward they've become walking Bibendums. It's tragic if you think about it. An entire people incapable of eating healthy food. Children are obese, parents are obese. It's clear something went wrong between the seventies and the eighties. What ?
Re:America = snowball (Score:4, Insightful)
Doritos happened.
In all seriousness, when I was a kid growing up in the '70s and '80s, Doritos were like the most awesome thing ever, and I loved those things. Doritos, Oreos, Pringles and Fritos were my favorite pleasures on earth.
Two things have changed since then. First, I bet if I could go back in time and look at that "big" bag of Doritos I used to savor for a month or something, it was probably only a little bigger than a modern "big grab" bag, if not the same size. Second, I only got to eat any of the above foods once in a rare while, because they were "too expensive" to keep on hand. My staple diet growing up was home cooking from either my aunt or my mother.
We all need more home cooking, and less junk. Junk has its place, but too many of us make a staple diet of it, and I'm pretty close to being as bad for this as you can get. Some weeks I literally live on Doritos and Dr. Pepper and never have a real meal at all. Imagine, if you will, how it could possibly have come to pass that I am overweight, and about to turn obese. It helps nothing that I earn money by putting my ass in a seat and doing very little physical activity.
Unless you're a porn star or an athlete, there's just no money in physical activity.
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Unless you're a porn star or an athlete, there's just no money in physical activity.
Re: America = snowball (Score:1)
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You can't blame a lack of physical activity when the average BMR(sitting in bed all day) is 6500kj(1550~kcal) and the average recommend dietary intake is 7500kj(1800~ kcal). So bodyheat is claiming the vast majority of every human beings energy output, keeping us at 37c.
During exercise, a well known a side effect is heat generation, this increases the efficiency of that output. Cardiovascular exercise
Re:America = snowball (Score:5, Insightful)
The "low-fat" craze that caused everyone to start eating a lot more sugar and spiking their insulin constantly.
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I have lost 75 lbs by exercise and avoiding "diet" food.
Real butter and fatty food fills you up faster and stays longer. Diet foods keep you hungry and eating more.
Most people will start to diet when they notice that they are getting a little fat. But the diet with diet food makes them more hungry and they overeat and loose will power this you get fatter.
There is a good trend toward Diet Food and obesity.
McDonalds Coca-Cola have been around for generations. However diet foods started in the 80s
Re:America = snowball (Score:4, Informative)
I just started a keto diet a month ago eating nothing but butter, steak, eggs, cheese, bacon, chicken, and green beans.. I am already down 20lbs (fair enough most of it water weight), and 2 belt notches tighter.
Yes I am morbidly obese, i have tried things in the past but my stomach was a bottomless pit. It was actually here on slashdot where I first heard about keto. I did more research, and this is the first time I have tried a diet where I am actually not fucking starving all the time. Tried pure calorie counting in the past but always was hungry.
Now after a normal sized meal of steak with a slab of butter on it, and steam greened beans with another slab of butter on that, it fills me up.
It is awesome that I can now eat awesome good foods, that are actually healthy (although not perceived healthy in normal society because OMG FAT AND CHOLESTEROL) 70% of my calories come from fat, 25% from protein, 5% from carbs (and most of carbs from natural occurring in vegetables).
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Yeah right...
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A lot of additives, preservatives, were approved in the 70s.
Look at the list on the back of any snack wrapper. Look at the amount of oils, salty preservatives or just plain sugar/corn syrup present.
Unfortunately this article is more about a scam to resell knowledge we already possess as something new to $tudy.
The more intricate and involved "Americans" lives get, the less their ability to overcome with logic their base animal brains directives about feeding in a pack situation.
Obesity is less about the qual
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Even if "everyone knows" or "it's common knowledge", we still have to dot every "i" and cross every "t". After all, "everyone knew" that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. And that "bleeding someone" was good for them. And that "trains going faster than a horse could run would suck the oxygen out of their passenger's lungs." And "We can see canals, water canals, and plants growing on Mars with our telescopes."
Portion control is a huge problem. In the original submission, I had added "BTW
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Yes, portion control IS the problem. You see, our lives have become so complex, our brains are always trying to handle more than they should. To offset the load on our conscious thinking, we go on autopilot, with more primal thinking using the layer beneath consciousness; the animal brain, our base functions handed down through genetic memory. Think of it as the Basic programming language for the animal kingdom. People and all others have been PROGRAMMED through survival of the species to eat until full. It
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That could also explain why people over-eat when sitting in front of the couch. They're stuffing their face on autopilot. Ditto with sitting in front of their computer or packing on their cell phone - so we could say that facebook makes you fat (give people another reason to stop using it so much). So it's not the physical inactivity per se, but the behaviors associated with it.
I think fight or flight is more complex, because in dangerous situations you often don't the time to think - you're already rea
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It's clear something went wrong between the seventies and the eighties. What ?
The coddling, enabling, reactionary post world war two generation started taking over.
Re:America = snowball (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at photographs from the sixties and seventies of Americans or even earlier. Normal people. From the eighties onward they've become walking Bibendums. It's tragic if you think about it. An entire people incapable of eating healthy food. Children are obese, parents are obese. It's clear something went wrong between the seventies and the eighties. What ?
The share of spending on food has fallen from %30 of the household budget in the 50's to less than %13. Simply put until quite recently overeating was something only the rich could comfortably afford.
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Although Europeans love to act like that...
We're just a few years ahead of the rest of the pack
I go to Western Europe semi-regularly, no shortage of fatasses, especially the UK...
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So obesity in America is a snowball effect and cannot be stopped.
Look at photographs from the sixties and seventies of Americans or even earlier. Normal people. From the eighties onward they've become walking Bibendums. It's tragic if you think about it. An entire people incapable of eating healthy food. Children are obese, parents are obese. It's clear something went wrong between the seventies and the eighties. What ?
Marketing. I watched a show "The man who made us fat". Someone in a fast food chain (ok, I didn't pay a lot of attention...) worked out that if you gave out bigger portions and charged more, people still ate it all rather than leave it half-finished and 'waste it'.
Makes sense, if you think of it. When's the last time you just said "that's it, I've had enough" and didn't finish a meal that you'd paid for? (Especially a dessert...)
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The snowball has reached europe, and it hit the U.K.
first, but we europeans are starting to catch up.
Serving staff (Score:2)
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So can we expect all the junk food emporiums to now start recruiting fatties to serve their customers?
Sound reasonable. Though with the current overweight ratio in America.. Don't they already by simple stastical chance?
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So can we expect all the junk food emporiums to now start recruiting fatties to serve their customers?
I take it it's been a while since you've actually seen the staff that work there now...
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Re: Serving staff (Score:2)
I, for one, completely lose my appetite in the presence or morbidly obese people. Fat people too, to lesser degree.
The fact that I'm very lean probably has something to do with it.
McSoylents (Score:2)
First time I read that I thought it said recycling.
Fat suit? Weird. (Score:1)
"The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit." It must have been too difficult to find an obese person in Illinois.
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Not really, it's just if they paid a fat lady to stuff food into herself, they could have been sued for damages.
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no I think it was more they couldn;t find a fat person that would eat a salad.
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Not really, it's just if they paid a fat lady to stuff food into herself, they could have been sued for damages.
An obese lady would attempt to sue due to one meal?
This would be that one time where I would actually welcome the term "pre-existing condition", since it would be quite obvious and fitting here.
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"The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit." It must have been too difficult to find an obese person in Illinois.
No, this was to reduce the number of variables in the experiment. Same woman, same hair color, same face, same eye color, etc, but different apparent body build.
Fat suit ? (Score:2)
The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit.
Why ? I can't imagine it would be too hard to find a genuinely fat person to take the job.
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And control for lots of other things like body language.
In fact, I doubt facial attractiveness was on anyone's mind here except yours.
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The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit.
Why ? I can't imagine it would be too hard to find a genuinely fat person to take the job.
No, but a bit harder for her to do the control as 'normal sized'... I assume the study wanted the same person in both tests to eliminate as many other variables as possible.
Is the reverse true? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the reverse is true, which seems fairly likely, there'll be an equilibrium at some point. If that point is overweight for both persons, it'd be interesting to which trend continued (assuming fat people eat less around slimmer people). I guess they'll publish more papers exploring the other combinations of people in the future.
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No. Basically, thin people think they can eat more and not get fat because they're not fat right now and they don't plan on eating so much next time (or next time, or the time after that, until they realize they've become fat).
For fat people, they have to want to lose weight for a thin person to affect them because they'll be looking at what that person is eating and figure they'll slim down if they can just limit themselves to only that much. Oh, and they also have to have the willpower to ignore the dull
Two words... (Score:2)
Mirror Neurons. [wikipedia.org]
Alternate explanation (Score:1)
Everyone seems to be focusing on imitation but what if the reason is different? What if the reason is lack of pressure? Namely "They're heavy, they won't judge me." is taken as an excuse to let self control loose. Seeing it controlled vs eating alone would be interesting and could help narrow it down. If alone and feeling unwatched would people eat more alone than even with someone heavier would imply the pressure theory, while eating more with someone heavier than while alone and unwatched would imply imit
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Good, now go get some grant money and prove it.
The conclusion section of any study, especially in social sciences, is basically the op-ed page. At some point, the studies pile up and people have to give up their opinions and do science.
But anything sufficiently novel is the author seeing what they expected to see. And it will remain so until another study figures out how to answer questions like you raised.
Now, how do you propose to separate those variables and answer those questions?
"welcoming the opportunity to blame someone else" (Score:4, Insightful)
As opposed to where the OP wants the blame placed.
Re:That's odd. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't "blaming" anyone. At no point was any "blame" made. At no point in the study did they ask the guys "Why did you eat so much pasta?" and at no point did anyone say "The fat lady made me do it."
This is nothing more than observed behaviour. Most of this type of behaviour is subconscious, so in many ways you probably have had a fat person grab your hand and shovel food down your throat.
This may also explain why the only person looking to lay blame on anyone appears to be you.
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This isn't "blaming" anyone. At no point was any "blame" made.
I would expect to see the same effect with alcohol. In the company of people that are drinking a lot, you are probably drinking more than your norm.
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I'm not quite sure.
I'm guessing that some aspect of why people are choosing to eat more is simply because food is life and we are wired to feel like we need to "compete" for food. If we see a spread of food that we are going to eat, and then see fat people near it, we might want to eat more for fear of not getting any. The same could be true for, say, the youngest child of six. Not because of the weight, but because they see their odds of getting food dwindle and they will try and eat as much as they can.
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I get it, this is just another example of blame someone else rather than accept responsibility for your own actions.
Seems like a convenient way to avoid that this is a societal issue and not just an individual's personal failure.
Re:That's odd. (Score:5, Informative)
It's got nothing to do with willpower. The point of the study is that people who otherwise eat normally and maintain a healthy weight unconsciously eat more when observing fat people eat first. Willpower is not an issue, they are not even aware of what is happening.
This is important. Adverts could use fat people to sell more of their product. Societies that have a lot of obese people make it harder for everyone to stay at a healthy weight, regardless of willpower.
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Do remember those articles about how a person who reads facts that disagree with their beliefs actually digs in and is more convinced they are right?
Kinda wondering how it feels to be that guy.
It's called the backfire effect, popularly, if you get curious.
Second hand fat? (Score:4, Funny)
So, do we put them in special sections with visual barriers, or just make them eat outside where we can't see them? Will we see fat people huddled around doorways in winter, banished outside while they eat their Snickers?
Re:Second hand fat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe simply observing behaviour does not immediately mean we need to do something about the behaviour.
A modest proposal (Score:2)
I propose we immediately isolate the carriers of "fattening disease".
After all, it's infectious and it creates more casualties than ebola and the black plague combined! And since we don't know the vectors yet, other than "fat women", we should isolate anyone with a BMI over 25. In any case they shouldn't be allowed to travel. I mean, it might spread to Europe. Or even Africa, which has so far been mercifully untouched by "fattening disease"!
Summary doesn't match articles (Score:1)
The summary says, "each served themselves more pasta than the "fat" woman had selected while taking less salad than she did."
The articles both say that the amount of food that the actress took was irrelevant. All that mattered was whether she was wearing the prosthesis (what the summary refers to as a "fat suit").
Given the way that they did the study though, I'm not terribly convinced. We're talking about 82 people here. Wouldn't it make more sense to monitor their behavior over multiple visits with mult
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Experiment: what if the companion was Andre? (Score:2)
Prepare for the experiment:
1. Gather one hour and fifty-one minutes of food and drink
2. Get comfortable
Perform the experiment:
4. Visit this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVCbIzeQb30 [youtube.com]
5. Report results.
SPOILER: AT 1:28:33 he says the word, "inconceivable"
This study is flawed for so many reasons (Score:1)
This hall experiment seems like a good lesson explaining why correlation is not causation and how NOT to measure correlation.
1. First of all, they published only the mean and not the variance so we can’t tell how different the quantities were among the participants. Another data that is missing is the time and day of the different meals.
2. It seems the fat person was only the first person in the line so it’s very strange it affected the rest of the people waiting in the line who did not
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Not science (Score:4, Insightful)
Studies involving a small (82), biased (coeds) number of college students who were primed (required to watch) are not science. "The conclusion was simple". As is anyone believing said conclusion.
Yet another case of a prior conclusion being reached by a fabricated "study". Groundwork for controlling people's diets.
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...and this not one day after another Slashdot article where the research involved 19 PARTICIPANTS .
When will the Slashdot editors (and the news media in general) stop reporting these barely preliminary results as if they're commandments from God?
When will all these "researchers" grow some ethics, do proper research and analysis, and report statistically significant findings?
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Why shouldn't people's diets be controlled by the government? Because everyone has different needs, and treating everyone as the statistical mean person is bad for almost everyone. For a simplistic example, controlling food to make it very hard for people to gain weight is bad for underweight people.
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evolution-wise, it would make sense (Score:2)
Considering the bulk of human evolution has been spent hungry, looking for something to eat, it makes perfect sense to emulate people who appear to be the opposite of hungry.
.
Not only is (whatever they are eating) fundamentally safe, it's so abundant they're fat. For all but the last 50 years, those were purely positive cues.
Note the actress wrote a 50 lb fat suit....I'm curious if she was morbidly obese (ie 150lb fat suit, obviously unhealthy) if the same would still be true.
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And if the result had been the opposite, you would say that it makes sense because we don't imitate people with negative food related outcomes. Like poisoning, or fat, because it is harder to outrun a bear when poisoned or fat.
What really happened was you read thus, decided you had no pre existing beliefs that were threatened, and worked it into your mental framework. Then you pulled it back out, along with all of the information you used when evaluating it initially.
And that's normal. I'm just cautioning y
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What? That doesn't even make sense? Yes, different results might have prompted me to speculate on different bases for the behavior. Is that astonishing?
In the first place, using your backwards example, if there was a study showing that people watching thin people took less food, yes, I'd probably say that it could be because people watching healthy people are going to emulate them. We're a social species, we do lots of things because of simple emulation.
If there was a study showing people behaved CONTRA
Apples and oranges? (Score:2)
We need Obesity laws! (Score:1)
Standards (Score:2)
Isn't this just an illustration that - no matter how we try to believe it was otherwise - standards level down?
If someone's stuffing herself silly then as long as you eat a bit less than she does you can get away with it because you're not the pig of the group.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if a similar situation existed around beer consumption, pinching things from the office, speeding or illegal parking etc.
Different Perspective (Score:1)
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Hell yeah, I personally could do without El Rushbo AND Michael Moore.