Department of Occupational, Economic, and Social Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Department of Occupational, Economic, and Social Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2024 Oct;250:104509. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104509. Epub 2024 Oct 1.
We examine whether the prevalence of healthy and tasty food options in restaurant menus leads to the formation of beliefs about the relationship between healthiness and taste that deviate from the correlation of healthiness and taste ratings. Participants (N = 195) rated the healthiness and taste of twelve dishes from two different restaurant types (American and vegetarian restaurants), estimated the frequencies of healthy and tasty options, and reported their health-taste beliefs. Results show that ratings of perceived healthiness and expected taste are uncorrelated in both restaurant types, but participants formed the misbelief that unhealthy dishes taste better than healthy dishes to a greater extent in American than in vegetarian restaurants. Regression analyses revealed that the absolute frequencies of food options were significantly related to participants' health-taste beliefs while controlling for the correlation between healthiness and taste ratings in both restaurant types. Participants were more likely to believe that healthy food tastes better than unhealthy food when they perceived that healthy and tasty food were both frequent (or infrequent) in the respective restaurant type. Our results provide evidence that relying on absolute frequencies, rather than covariation, to infer the relationship between healthiness and taste may lead to misbeliefs that do not reflect the health-taste correlation of individual food items.
我们研究了餐厅菜单中健康美味食物选择的流行程度是否会导致人们形成与健康和口味相关性不符的健康与口味关系的信念。参与者（N=195）对来自两种不同餐厅类型（美式餐厅和素食餐厅）的十二道菜进行了健康和口味的评价，估计了健康和美味选项的出现频率，并报告了他们的健康口味信念。结果表明，在两种餐厅类型中，感知健康度和预期口味的评分都不相关，但与素食餐厅相比，参与者更错误地认为不健康的菜肴比健康的菜肴味道更好。回归分析表明，在控制两种餐厅类型中健康度和口味评分的相关性后，食物选项的绝对频率与参与者的健康口味信念显著相关。当参与者认为健康美味的食物在各自的餐厅类型中都很常见（或不常见）时，他们更有可能认为健康的食物比不健康的食物味道更好。我们的研究结果提供了证据，表明依靠绝对频率而不是协方差来推断健康和口味之间的关系可能会导致不符合个体食物健康口味相关性的错误信念。
