Always gamble on an empty stomach: hunger is associated with advantageous decision making.

Denise de Ridder,Marieke Adriaanse,Catharine Evers,Floor Kroese,Thomas Boraud

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111081

Abstract

Three experimental studies examined the counterintuitive hypothesis that hunger improves strategic decision making, arguing that people in a hot state are better able to make favorable decisions involving uncertain outcomes. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that participants with more hunger or greater appetite made more advantageous choices in the Iowa Gambling Task compared to sated participants or participants with a smaller appetite. Study 3 revealed that hungry participants were better able to appreciate future big rewards in a delay discounting task; and that, in spite of their perception of increased rewarding value of both food and monetary objects, hungry participants were not more inclined to take risks to get the object of their desire. Together, these studies for the first time provide evidence that hot states improve decision making under uncertain conditions, challenging the conventional conception of the detrimental role of impulsivity in decision making.

Highlights

In their daily lives, people are frequently confronted with selfcontrol dilemmas requiring them to choose between an immediate but small reward or a larger reward in the long run. [1] Opting for a small reward when a bigger one is available can be regarded as self-control failure, even when the bigger one is delayed
The objective of Study 2 was to replicate the findings from Study 1 by employing a more subtle manipulation of a hot state by increasing appetite for food, ruling out potentially physiological effects of hunger that may interfere with our aim to manipulate hot states
To rule out the possibility that our findings were restricted to Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) performance solely, we used an alternative task for assessing complex decision making under uncertain conditions

Summary

Introduction

People are frequently confronted with selfcontrol dilemmas requiring them to choose between an immediate but small reward or a larger reward in the long run. [1] Opting for a small reward when a bigger one is available can be regarded as self-control failure, even when the bigger one is delayed. [4] hungry people become more wanting of food [5] and tend to forget about their weight goals [6] These findings make sense when considering that hot states in general, and visceral drives in particular, are adaptive physiological states that increase the motivation to satisfy important immediate (physical) needs, such as drinking water when thirsty. Potentially even more problematic, visceral states do affect motivation for rewards corresponding with the drive (e.g., getting food when hungry) and may generalize to unrelated rewarding behaviors, such as when people report a stronger desire for money when hungry [7] or become more impulsive when sexually aroused [8]. There seems to be consensus that visceral drives and other hot states make people myopic for the future’ and hurt their long-term interests. [9]

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Conclusion