Another Slice of Pizza, Darling?
Men double their food intake when in the company of women
I’ve never understood people who start their Sundays with a slice of last night’s cold pizza. Not because I find congealed, stale take-out food disgusting. It’s just that if I buy a pizza I’m eating a pizza. I’m eating that pizza until there’s no more pizza left to eat. Until my stomach resembles a punched calzone. Leftovers do not exist in my house.
But I also acknowledge that I am not normal. Most of you know when to call it a day. Maybe after three slices. Maybe after two. Maybe, if you’re a complete maniac, you claim to be full after a single slice of pizza.
Why is that? Is it all down to appetite, metabolism, or a desire to preserve your dignity by not cramming another wodge of cheesy dough down your gullet like a happy pelican?
Or is it because of the company you keep? It’s possible. A team of economists from Cornell University have found that the amount of food we eat depends on the sex of our dining partner.
Kevin Kniffin and his colleagues visited an “all you can eat” restaurant where customers pay a set amount and are then free to consume as much pizza as they desire. The researchers kept a close eye on what the customers ate. At the end of service, they had tallied up how many slices of pizza 74 men and 59 women had put away.
Kniffin also kept track of the sex of each customer’s dining companions.
After crunching the numbers, the scientists found that men who dined with women ate significantly more pizza than men whose companions were all male.
Men in all-male groups consumed an average of 1.6 slices of pizza. Men accompanied by a woman ate almost 3 slices, a massive 93% difference!
Women chowed down an average of 1.3 slices when eating with men and 1.1 slices when eating with other women, a difference that was not statistically significant.
Why do men get the munchies around women? Kniffin reckons it’s because men like to show off. He says:
“Sustained overeating most likely leads to body shapes that women do not typically consider to be attractive; however, in the context of short-term events (e.g., a single meal), it is plausible that overeating would be recognized as an attractive demonstration of strength and energy.”
The researchers point out that recent research by another team suggests men may be especially keen to eat new foods because it advertises their strong immune systems. When a man demolishes a double serving of pizza he may be showing his date he has an iron constitution. Or that he’s unperturbed by the prospect of furry arteries and developing a spare tyre that would fit a monster truck.
Incidentally, men’s overeating is not confined to fatty foods. Kniffin and his team also found that men eat more salad when dining with women. A man eating with other men will eat 2.7 small bowls of salad; when he eats with a woman he’ll put away 5 bowls. Women eat the same amount of salad (~5 bowls) regardless of the sex of their dining partners.
Kniffin acknowledges that his data cannot tell us “whether the showing-off is a product of female mate choice or intrasexual competition among men”. He suggests that an interesting follow-up experiment could be run at an eating contest.
“Future research that includes hormonal assays could test whether people who win eating contests tend to experience the kind of testosterone increases — and decreases — that researchers have found when people win — and lose — other contests (e.g., wrestling matches).”
Kniffin, K. M., Sigirci, O., & Wansink, B. (in press). Eating heavily: Men eat more in the company of women. Evolutionary Psychological Science. Read summary
For an audio version of this story, see the 17 November 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
