Nutrition Videos

Some researchers decided to do an experiment. They gathered a few hundreds of people in a room and gave them a piece of paper and a pencil. Then, they asked them to write the last two digits of their Social Security No. After everyone had written the last two digits of their Social Security No., 15, 43, 87, etc., they were asked to price a bottle of wine that they'd never seen before. Namely, they were showed a bottle of wine and they were asked to write how much they thought it cost. Afterwards, the pieces of paper were collected and divided into two groups. The first group were the Social Security No. ending in 0-49, and the second one were the Social Security No. ending in 50-99. Then, the average of the wine pricing by the people with the lowest Social Security No., namely up to 49, was calculated and compared with the average of the people with the highest No., namely up to 99. They discovered that the group with the highest numbers priced the wine higher than the group with the lowest numbers. This means that when you write a number, low or high, this influences the pricing of a bottle of wine the real price of which nobody knows. The results troubled the researchers. They wondered how the last two digits of the Social Security No. are related to the pricing of a bottle of wine the real price of which is not known. So, they decided to do the experiment again, but this time, they explained the participants that the last two digits of the Social Security No. have nothing to do with the price of the wine. However, the results were the same. The group with the highest numbers priced the wine higher again. The researchers were now shocked and decided to repeat the experiment, but this time, they informed the participants about the results of the two previous studies. They told them that the people that had a high Social Security No. had priced the wine higher the two previous times, namely they warned them about the mistake that was made the two previous times, so that they could avoid it. Afterwards, they repeated the experiment in the exact same way. The results were once more exactly the same. The researchers were in despair. But what they discovered was another fallacy or bias that torments our brain and leads us to wrong decisions or thoughts that are called cognitive biases or fallacies. What they also confirmed was that even when we know the bias or fallacy, it's very hard to avoid it. These are cognitive shortcuts that our brain makes, in order to work faster and endure the endless volume of information that it has to process every second. It's like going to your friend's house by car and, without realizing, following the route to your work. Only after you've taken some wrong turns, do you realize that you're heading in the wrong direction. Or it's like some visual fallacies, like the one you're looking at now, where the two lines have the same length, but one of them seems shorter. Even when you know that the two lines have the same length, one of them seems shorter. These shortcuts help a lot in our every-day life, but they sometimes lead us to a different route than the one we want to take. In order to avoid them, we have to be prepared to recognize them, namely to know them, as well as to make conscious actions and thoughts, so that we can be able to dodge the bullet sometimes. Don't be too strict with yourselves. It's very hard to dodge the bullet. But with patience and effort, u may manage to avoid some of these biases or fallacies sometimes. A lot of these fallacies and biases affect our dietary choices too. Within the context of the "Psychology and Diet" series, which is posted every second Wednesday, I'll present some of these fallacies and biases and how they affect our choices regarding our diet and our way of life. Thank you very much.