Comparing live and remote models in eating conformity research.

Research demonstrates that people conform to how much other people eat. This conformity occurs in the presence of other people (live model) and when people view information about how much food prior participants ate (remote models). The assumption in the literature has been that remote models produce a similar effect to live models, but this has never been tested. To investigate this issue, we randomly paired participants with a live or remote model and compared their eating to those who ate alone. We found that participants exposed to both types of model differed significantly from those in the control group, but there was no significant difference between the two modeling procedures.