The psychology of food choice: some often encountered fallacies

Abstract

Sensory science and consumer science are very young compared with the other scientific disciplines from which they have borrowed well-established methods. Methods and practices commonly used in sensory science and in consumer research are critically reviewed from a psychologist's point of view and alternative solutions are suggested. Five frequent fallacies are described and illustrated: the idea that people are uniform, that they are consistent, that they make rational choices, that their perception is more important than their memory of sensory impressions and that situations are characterised by objectively measurable context variables.