The Breakfast Pub: The inhibitory effect of a no-intake model on actual intake

Abstract

One of the proposed mechanisms underlying social modeling of food intake is that people, in absence of clear guidelines, use the intake of the other person as a source of normative information about how much they can eat themselves. Although social modeling effects have proven to be very powerful, they have been observed primarily in situations in which participants ate snacks and the appropriate amount to eat may be unclear. Breakfast consumption is a stable and habitual eating behavior within individuals for which a pre-existing norm for appropriate intake appears to exist. Main aim of this study is to examine social modeling effects on young women's breakfast intake in a semi-naturalistic setting. An experimental-observational paradigm was used in which we varied the confederate’ breakfast intake during a 20-min break in between two cover tasks. A total of 61 Dutch women (M age = 21.22; M BMI = 20.73) participated. We found that participants consumed less energy when exposed to a peer eating nothing than when exposed to a peer eating a small or large amount of breakfast. Our results indicate a substantial inhibition effect of young women's breakfast intake when they are confronted with a same-sex companion eating nothing.