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Seeing Yourself Eat Cake Makes It Less Delicious, Study Finds

Nothing quite ruins the taste of cake like having to watch yourself eat it.
Image: Flickr/Andrew Gustar.

So I have this, uh, "friend" (never mind his/her name) who really likes eating cake. After a long night of producing engaging and thought provoking content for an online science and technology magazine (we'll just call it "Bothermoard"), all my friend ever feels like doing is tucking into some baked dessert. Angel, bundt, fruit, birthday, wedding, ice cream—the type isn't so important, and this lack of discretion is exactly what is troubling. Recently, he/she began prowling confectioneries for something called "beefcake," and I knew it was time to intervene.

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I was at a loss for how to temper my friend's cake lust until a team of researchers from the University of Central Florida offered a solution: mirrors. As the team detailed in a new study to be published next month in the inaugural issue of Journal of the Association of Consumer Research, the presence of mirrors in a dining room can drive people to make healthier eating choices.

To test this hypothesis, the University of Central Florida team, led by assistant professor of marketing Ata Jami, had 185 undergraduates participate in a taste test in which they chose between chocolate cake and a fruit salad. After making their choice, they would taste the fruit salad or chocolate cake in one of two rooms: one with mirrors or one without. Those who tested the cake in the room with mirrors generally found it to be less tasty than those who tested it in the room without mirrors, while the presence of mirrors had no effect on the reported taste of the fruit salad.

"A glance in the mirror tells people more than just about their physical appearance," said Jami in a statement. "It enables them to view themselves objectively and helps them to judge themselves and their behaviors in a same way that they judge others."

According to Jami, mirrors encourage you to evaluate yourself in accordance with perceived standards of social correctness. If you look in the mirror to find yourself violating these standards, it leads to feelings of discomfort. Thus, eating unhealthy foods in the presence of a mirror will induce discomfort and thus lower the perceived taste of the food. Eating a healthy food is not seen as violating social standards of correctness however, so mirrors do not cause any discomfort and a corresponding decrease in perceived taste. Importantly, this phenomenon only occurs if the diners choose their own food, as this places the responsibility for their meal with no one but themselves.

Although the mirrors only altered the perceived taste of unhealthy foods, rather than making people less inclined to eat the cake in the presence of a mirror, the team hopes that the discomfort experienced by watching yourself eat unhealthy food will lead to behavioral modification over time. The general idea is that people choose unhealthy foods because they believe they will be more tasty than their healthy alternatives. By making the unhealthy foods seem less tasty by inducing discomfort in the diner, the team believes the diner will be less inclined to choose the unhealthy alternative in the future as a means of avoiding this previously experienced discomfort.

As the team noted in their study, this observation is important because it could be possible to prompt better eating habits in restaurants by decking them out with mirrors. By subtly modifying dining behavior with mirrors, the team hopes it can help stem the rising tide of obesity by reminding diners that the tastiness of unhealthy foods is severely hampered by having to watch yourself stuff your face with them.