Setting a social norm regarding food intake in children

Contains fulltext : 90155.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)People use other's food intake as a social norm indicating how much they are 'allowed' to eat. Ample experimental research showed the impact of peer modeling on food intake in adolescents and adults, whereas few studies focused on young children. This study used an innovative design in a naturalistic setting to investigate whether a social norm in food intake that was set by a confederate peer would still be followed by the participant a few days later. Therefore, we made use of two sessions in which the participants (N = 221) were asked to perform a cover task, i.e. solving a puzzle in 10 min. In the first session, they had to cooperate with a same-sex normal-weight confederate that was instructed to either consume nothing, a small (3) or a large (10) amount of chocolate-coated peanuts. In the second session (at least two days later), the participant was left alone with a variety of foods. An ANCOVA, with hunger and liking of the chocolate-coated peanuts as covariates, revealed significant main effects for eating condition on kcal consumed in the first session F(2,217) = 12.34, p < 0.001 as well as in the second session F(2,218) = 6.26, p < 0.001. Post-hoc Bonferroni tests showed a significant difference in food intake between children in the no-intake and high intake condition in both sessions. This suggests that a social norm was being set during the first session which still served as a norm for the participant in the second session. No differences were found in effects between children with a low or high BMI. In sum, our findings showed that children are strongly affected by a peer's food intake.1 p