Recent research has revealed that specific tastes can influence moral processing, with sweet tastes inducing prosocial behavior and disgusting tastes harshening moral judgments. Do similar effects apply to different food types (comfort foods, organic foods, etc.)? Although organic foods are often marketed with moral terms (e.g., Honest Tea, Purity Life, and Smart Balance), no research to date has investigated the extent to which exposure to organic foods influences moral judgments or behavior. After viewing a few organic foods, comfort foods, or control foods, participants who were exposed to organic foods volunteered significantly less time to help a needy stranger, and they judged moral transgressions significantly harsher than those who viewed nonorganic foods. These results suggest that exposure to organic foods may lead people to affirm their moral identities, which attenuates their desire to be altruistic.
Viewing foods isn’t the same thing as eating them. What a strange methodology. It’s also disingenuous to talk about “tastes” as though they were feeding people and then seeing how it influenced them, when that didn’t happen.
I know you’re joking, but surely the correlation is the other direction. More assholes think they are special, and organic food is touted as special food, so they think they deserve it.
I’ve heard of studies like this before, where the moral higher parts of the brain piggyback on the visceral parts that deal with everyday biology and people’s judgments get confused. A good example is disgust and nausea. Those were created to help us avoid noxious food, but when we became social they became the same ‘stick’ we use to punish bad behavior. So socially destructive behavior warrants the same language and body reactions of disgust from eating bad food. Nausea, disgust, repulsion, etc. We evolved nausea and disgust to avoid eating tainted meat, now we use it to shun people who are social pariahs.
Other studies I have heard is if you ask someone to hold a cold drink while describing someone they are more likely to describe that person as ‘icy, cold’ etc. If you give them a warm drink they are more likely to say they were ‘warm, etc’.
Seeing how our social terms for altruism and pro-social behavior seem to mimic our tastes in food “isn’t he sweet” “she is disgusting” “he made me want to vomit” “I could just eat you up” I wouldn’t be surprised if there is overlap between the brain regions and exposure to sweet food makes people more pro social and visa versa.
The fact that organic food (stereotypically) tastes like crap and sweet food tastes good probably has a lot to do with it. I just saw an abstract though and it didn’t seem to go in that direction.
