Ordering Pizza Online Is When You Let Your Freak Flag Fly

Americans—and, hell, Europeans too—love their food delivery services. With the average American spending $1,100 a year ordering food online (that's $91.66 a month), it's safe to say that we're head over heels for the notion of having a stranger bring bags and boxes of restaurant food to our homes. No servers. All sweatpants.

If you're face-to-face with a waitress at your local corner bistro, you might be a little hesitant to order two loaves of garlic bread, fettuccine Alfredo, and a chocolate lava cake just for your own fattening gratification. But just as how in space no one can hear you scream, on the internet, no one can see your true gluttony. And even better, typing in your credit card number just doesn't create the same pangs of guilty frivolity than forking over wads of cash at a counter.

A study published in Management Science affirms this phenomenon—and reveals that when we order online, we take in more calories and throw around more cash when it comes to pizza, specifically.

Researchers from the University of Toronto, Duke University, and the National University of Singapore teamed up to examine how online ordering affects the ordering habits of diners, using data gathered from 160,000 different food orders from a pizza chain, placed by 56,000 different households.

When customers ordered from behind the judgement-free zone of their computer screens, they added an average of 3.5 percent more calories and included 14 percent more special instructions—such as combining toppings—than people who ordered over the phone or in person. Asking a restaurant employee standing before you to write your cat's name in ranch dressing on a Meat Lover's pizza might result in some awkward stares and pauses, but over the 'net, hell—go to town. Social norms, begone.

"When we think we're free from social judgments, we'll order what we really want," Ryan McDevitt, the economics professor at Duke's Fuqua Graduate School of Business who conceptualized the study, commented about its results.

There's a reason why Bronies and Real Doll enthusiasts prefer to congregate on message boards rather than in broad daylight: on the internet, anything goes. Let barbecue potato chip crumbs litter your chest while you cyber with a rando. Wear a diaper. No parents, no rules.

So go ahead and get double anchovies and pineapple and wash it down with a gallon jug of chocolate milk. No one's watching—except a team of researchers, that is.