Do you lack self-control when it comes to food? If so, maybe you need to slow down a bit.
At least that’s the suggestion of researchers who recently exposed a group of 28 hungry college students to a series of computer images of food and asked them to mouse click on the grub they preferred.
Their conclusion? It takes longer for people to mentally process the health value of food than it does for them to process its anticipated taste. The findings were published in Psychological Science.
“These data suggest that slowing down decisions, even if only by adding a waiting period before choice, might increase the relative influence of abstract attributes like health,” wrote lead author Nicolette Sullivan, a graduate student in computation and neural systems at the California Institute of Technology.