Buzz
"Can I try that?" and "Are you going to eat that?"—questions that highlight our curiosity and desire to taste food from others' plates.
Eating out offers the obvious benefit of avoiding the hassle of preparation and cleanup, but there's an even subtler pleasure: food from your companion's plate often seems tastier, and sometimes, it might even surpass your own dish. There's a psychological reason for this.
A 2014 study published in Psychological Science [PDF] by Yale researchers involved 23 undergraduates who were asked to eat chocolate in the presence and absence of a researcher pretending to be another participant. The aim was to investigate whether their enjoyment of the chocolate changed when shared with someone else.
Participants enjoyed the chocolate more when shared, reporting it as significantly more pleasurable and tastier compared to those who ate it alone while their partner was occupied with another task unrelated to the chocolate. This effect persisted even when no direct communication about the chocolate took place.
In a similar follow-up experiment using bitter chocolate, participants once again showed a social influence on their perception of taste. They rated the chocolate as less enjoyable when they were aware that someone else was eating the same unpleasant item. This finding suggested that shared experiences affect even negative sensations.
What does this tell us? It seems that sharing food amplifies our sensory experience. Knowing that another person is having the same experience causes us to focus more on both the food and the shared connection. This is akin to how we mentally engage with someone else’s interpretation of a song or movie, a phenomenon called mentalizing. (“I wonder what my friend thinks about this scene...”) By contemplating their reaction, we also become more attuned to our own.
Researchers concluded, "We suspect that the effects observed in these experiments were due to increased attention to the shared stimulus between participants and the confederate. Sharing the chocolate-eating experience made the sensation more intense for participants, supporting the idea that shared experiences have a stronger psychological impact than those experienced alone."
So, it’s true: that stolen French fry tastes much better—if you’re sharing it with someone you know. Taking it from a stranger’s plate, however, is likely to be much less satisfying.
