6 ms·

What this makes me wonder is whether hunger would also affect other "gut" decisions by biasing towards direct sensory perceptual features and away from "cogniti

What this makes me wonder is whether hunger would also affect other "gut" decisions by biasing towards direct sensory perceptual features and away from "cognitive" features. This would be sort of like the stuff about how judges allegedly handed down harsher sentences just before lunch. But you could imagine similar stuff on other judgment tasks where bias of various kinds can exist, like "how friendly is this person" or "which of these places would you like to go to?" Looking at food and evaluating it for how good it is to eat is something we humans have evolved to do over thousands of years. Things like "NutriScores" have only existed for a few decades, and the details of them continue to vary from place to place and on a small timescale, so even people who are exposed to them can't always interpret them. This study can be interpreted as saying that we're more likely to use "primal" means to solve "primal" needs (e.g., use visual attributes of food to solve a need for food), and de-emphasize complex, culturally-derived tools like writing and numbers. It would be interesting to know how general that tendency is. I also enjoyed that the photo is of a person eating a hamburger and the study was done on students at the University of Hamburg.

genocidicbunny 2y ago
> What this makes me wonder is whether hunger would also affect other "gut" decisions by biasing towards direct sensory perceptual features and away from "cognitive" features. This would be sort of like the stuff about how judges allegedly handed down harsher sentences just before lunch. But you could imagine similar stuff on other judgment tasks where bias of various kinds can exist, like "how friendly is this person" or "which of these places would you like to go to?" Intuitively, it makes sense to me that it would. I definitely lose some impulse control and my pattern of thinking changes the hungrier I am. Someone that I know with both diabetes and anxiety has also spoken previously about how when their blood sugar levels get lower, certain aspects of their anxiety are also reduced, such as the decision paralysis or over-analyzing of choices that they are otherwise prone to. It would be interesting to see a study of how other primal needs affect food choices and more general decision making as well, and whether it's the same mechanism as with hunger. For example, sleep deprivation. > I also enjoyed that the photo is of a person eating a hamburger and the study was done on students at the University of Hamburg. This was pretty cute. A nice little bit of whimsy.
hsuduebc2 2y ago
From my anecdotal experience, being grumpy when hungry I would say definitely. :) But it's not just me for sure. A well-known study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2011 found that judges' decisions can be influenced by extraneous factors such as the time of day. Specifically, the study observed that judges were more likely to grant parole at the beginning of the day or after a meal break, with favorable rulings decreasing as the session progressed. This pattern suggests that factors unrelated to the legal merits of a case, like mental fatigue or hunger, can affect judicial decision-making. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1018033108 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1018033108 This is something I think is absolutely human as it is outrageous.
- jlev1 2y ago
  I have always found this response to the hungry judges study much more compelling than the study itself: http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html?m=1 http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j... > […] I want to take a different approach in this blog. I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism. > If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal.
  - watwut 2y ago
    The lunch break literally a thing that exists because society is organized around hunger a food a lot. People being somewhat harsher or less focused does not imply everything should stop. That is massive exaggeration. What happens is that organizations have lunch breaks and people have snacks so that effect is not too large.

genocidicbunny 2y ago

> What this makes me wonder is whether hunger would also affect other "gut" decisions by biasing towards direct sensory perceptual features and away from "cognitive" features. This would be sort of like the stuff about how judges allegedly handed down harsher sentences just before lunch. But you could imagine similar stuff on other judgment tasks where bias of various kinds can exist, like "how friendly is this person" or "which of these places would you like to go to?" Intuitively, it makes sense to me that it would. I definitely lose some impulse control and my pattern of thinking changes the hungrier I am. Someone that I know with both diabetes and anxiety has also spoken previously about how when their blood sugar levels get lower, certain aspects of their anxiety are also reduced, such as the decision paralysis or over-analyzing of choices that they are otherwise prone to. It would be interesting to see a study of how other primal needs affect food choices and more general decision making as well, and whether it's the same mechanism as with hunger. For example, sleep deprivation. > I also enjoyed that the photo is of a person eating a hamburger and the study was done on students at the University of Hamburg. This was pretty cute. A nice little bit of whimsy.

hsuduebc2 2y ago

From my anecdotal experience, being grumpy when hungry I would say definitely. :) But it's not just me for sure. A well-known study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2011 found that judges' decisions can be influenced by extraneous factors such as the time of day. Specifically, the study observed that judges were more likely to grant parole at the beginning of the day or after a meal break, with favorable rulings decreasing as the session progressed. This pattern suggests that factors unrelated to the legal merits of a case, like mental fatigue or hunger, can affect judicial decision-making. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1018033108 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1018033108 This is something I think is absolutely human as it is outrageous.

jlev1 2y ago
I have always found this response to the hungry judges study much more compelling than the study itself: http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html?m=1 http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j... > […] I want to take a different approach in this blog. I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism. > If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal.
- watwut 2y ago
  The lunch break literally a thing that exists because society is organized around hunger a food a lot. People being somewhat harsher or less focused does not imply everything should stop. That is massive exaggeration. What happens is that organizations have lunch breaks and people have snacks so that effect is not too large.