If you want to improve your health, go and dine with your diet-conscious friends. A latest study by University of Illinois researchers says that people tend to order the same food ordered by their friends who look after their health.
"My conclusion from the research is that people want to be different, but not that different," U of I food economist Brenna Ellison, said. "We want to fit in with the people we're dining with. It goes against the expectation that people will exhibit variety-seeking behavior; we don't want to be that different from others."
For the study, the researchers examined the diners at a restaurant for three months. The restaurant was divided into three groups, one of which served as a control group. Members in the control group were provided with only the name and price of the food. The other group had information about the calories for entree dishes. The third group had a 'traffic light' symbol next to their next calorie count information.
"[A] green traffic light items contained 400 calories or less, yellow light items had between 401 and 800 calories, and red light items contained more than 800 calories," the researchers wrote in the study.
"I would help bus tables sometimes so that I could watch and make sure that the tables were getting the right menus," Ellison said. "Or I would send people in as 'secret eaters.' They could eat whatever they wanted. I just wanted to make sure that they got the right menu for that section."
Ellison interacted with the staff to know more about the choices of food people made. "They said that people talked about the traffic lights a lot. And we did find that larger tables which received the traffic light menus did order fewer calories, on average, which suggests there was some peer pressure to order lower-calorie items," she said.
The researchers found that the diners generally ordered what their friends ordered. "The big take away from this research is that people were happier if they were making similar choices to those sitting around them," Ellison said. "If my peers are ordering higher-calorie items or spending more money, then I am also happier, or at least less unhappy, if I order higher-calorie foods and spend more money."
"The most interesting thing we found was that no matter how someone felt about the category originally, even if it was initially a source of unhappiness, such as the items in the salad category, this unhappiness was offset when others had ordered within the same category," Ellison said. "Given this finding, we thought it would almost be better to nudge people toward healthier friends than healthier foods."
