I love read­ing about food-related psy­cho­log­i­cal stud­ies and this one on how our eat­ing pref­er­ences are influ­enced (by our per­sonal val­ues, the food’s cul­tural mean­ing, and its phys­i­cal appear­ance) is no exception:

How we feel about a sausage […] says more about our per­sonal val­ues than about what the sausage actu­ally tastes like.

A large group of peo­ple were given a “human val­ues” test which seeks to mea­sure fifty six dif­fer­ent val­ues (loy­alty, ambi­tion, social order, etc.) Then, the sub­jects were asked to rate a vari­ety of sausages. Peo­ple who scored high on “social author­ity” — they believed it was impor­tant to sup­port peo­ple in power — tended to label the “veg­e­tar­ian” sausage as infe­rior, even when the veg­e­tar­ian sausage was actu­ally from a cow. Like­wise, peo­ple who scored low on “social power val­ues” tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actu­ally eat­ing meat. Instead of judg­ing the food prod­uct on its mer­its, they ended up pre­fer­ring the prod­uct that more closely con­formed to their value system.

I won­der what this means for me. I like veg­e­tar­ian sausages and always give seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion to the Sun­day nut roast; but I always go for the meat because, well, it’s more tra­di­tional, isn’t it?

via Link Banana