Higher-Order Thinking Affects the Immediate Experience of Your Food
A man is at his favorite restaurant and is enjoying a hot grilled burger that he has been looking forward to all day. Just as he takes another bite, his buddy tells him he saw a comment on twitter that this restaurant is using horsemeat in their burgers. Suddenly, his experience of the burger changes completely. His chewing slows, and he tells his buddy he doesn’t think the burger tastes right, that it tastes strange. He is associating the strange taste to the horsemeat that may have been used in his burger. Although the man has enjoyed many burgers over the past several years at this restaurant, his impression of the burger changed immediately upon hearing his buddy’s comments. Before they left the restaurant, his buddy finds the tweet and realizes it was about a different restaurant. Even so, the man could not finish eating his burger due to the thought that horsemeat might have been used. This example shows how learned information can immediately alter one’s experience while eating food.
It is common practice for people to reject food based on the way it smells or looks, this is an example of lower-order thinking because it is based solely on the information coming in from our senses. If food smells sour or you can see mold on it, then rejecting it is the logical and safe thing to do. While this decision doesn’t require higher-order thinking, having an eating experience be immediately changed due to something that was heard or suddenly remembered does. This sudden change shows the effects that our brain and thoughts can have on our sensory inputs. While people may regularly reject food based on color, taste and smell, this shows that people will also reject food based on their personal history and memories or new ideas presented while eating.
This concept was brought to my attention by Lisa Barrett in her book How Emotions are Made. In Chapter Two she tells about a “gross foods” party she held for her daughter’s twelfth birthday. While this is not an actual experiment, Barrett does observe the guests and records her observations with which she is able to show the power of simulation. Simulation is a product of higher-order thinking that causes your brain to overrule your lower-level thinking by believing details about a situation that may not be correct. At this “gross foods” party, Barrett served “pizza doctored with green food coloring so the cheese looked like fuzzy mold, and peach gelatin laced with bits of vegetables to look like vomit,” and for the drinks there was “white grape juice in medical urine sample cups.” Barrett stated that “several guests could not bring themselves to touch the food as they involuntarily simulated vile tastes and smells.” However, this was not the worst part for most guests. After lunch, they played a simple game to see who could identify food by their smell. Barrett explained that they “used smeared baby food – peaches, spinach, beef and so on – and artfully smeared it on diapers, so it looked exactly like baby poo.” Due to the presentation, several guests “actually gagged from the simulated smell” (Barrett, 2017, p. 27), even though they knew it was baby food and not waste.
Barret explains the reason why these simulations are so powerful and overwhelming to their experience is because “simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world” (Barrett, 2017, p. 27). The human brain makes a hypothesis based on the information acquired from one’s senses and past experiences, or previous knowledge. This shows higher-order thinking as one’s brain takes things that have been learned from lower-level thinking and adds on knowledge to create the hypothesis or simulation.
The effects of higher-order thinking is also apparent in situationswhere associations between Kids tend to change their diets to match the new trends that are occurring in their friend groups or by famous people that they look up to. If they see a movie star or sports hero in a commercial eating a certain food then they will generally want to add that into their diet even if it is not something that they would normally eat. Advertisers try to exploit this by putting ads about sugary cereal and other unhealthy and sugar packed snacks in the commercials during popular cartoons. To see how parents felt about the way that advertisers direct their commercials at the kids, a study was made by Jay (Hyunjae) Yu, with statements that you chose whether you agreed with or not. Many of the participants in the experiment agree that “there is too much sugar and fat in food products advertised in TV directed at children,” and that “TV food ads encourage my child to want products that he/she doesn’t need” (Yu, 2012). A clear majority of participants said that they agreed with these statements. This shows that parents feel that these TV ads directed towards their children have been affecting the child’s desire for these foods and will change the experience that the child has because they have seen other people eating these foods that they are now seeing in these commercials.
Higher-order thinking will cause people to experience the exact same foods in different ways because of the way that the food is presented and the ideas that are presented even if these ideas aren’t exactly true. This was tested many different times, and they have found a trend that people will let their immediate experiences be changed by the ideas they have on the categories the pieces of food were separated into. One example of a study that found this trend was conducted by Lisa Barrett and Eric Anderson. They designed and conducted an experiment with pieces of meat that were identical, but were said that one was from a human farm and the other was from a factory farm. The study focused on the way that people’s experience of the taste changed due to the labeling of the meat. When describing their experiment, they said that they “tested the hypothesis that beliefs influence eating by manipulating people's beliefs about two identical meat samples: people were led to believe one sample was raised on a 'factory farm' (negative belief) while the other was 'humanely raised' (positive belief).” The way the experiment was executed allowed for the only thing to affect their experience to be their thoughts of the labels that were presented with the meat. The results of this experiment showed that the “participants enjoyed beef jerky less when paired with the factory farm description compared to the humane farm description—even though the meat products were identical.” The experiment successfully showed how the higher-order thinking affected the way that the subject experienced the same piece of meat differently. To end their research, Barrett and Anderson stated that “These findings suggest that anyone interested in creating an experience (e.g. film-makers, designers, chefs) should consider how beliefs influence the user experience. Broadly, this work suggests top-down influences (such as affective beliefs) play an important role in shaping experience” (Anderson & Barrett, 2016).
When people are asked which method of growing produce creates a better taste, it may be more mental than they think. When their ideas are put to the test in a blind experiment it may not end the way that they had originally thought. To test their ideas, an experiment was designed that used apples that were labeled with their growing methods and unlabeled to diminish bias and see if their original answers still held true. This experiment used slices of apples that were picked close to the experiment to conserve freshness and they were chosen because of their similarity of their sizes, textures and appearance. “To their supporters and those believing they will taste better, organic and local labeled apples really taste better. For those in neither category, for the most part the slices from the same apple taste the same and they may wonder at those claiming organic and local foods taste better,” as stated in by John Bernard and Yinan Liu. People can become so stuck on thinking that a certain method of growing is better than others that they will believe that it tastes better and the only way to get past the bias that they have created is by a blind experiment like the one created with Gala apples. They proved that but stating “the sample in this study captured people covering a wide range of these opinions and beliefs and showed these do influence taste perceptions. Those with strongly held positive beliefs rated the taste of labeled organic and local apples significantly better than unlabeled slices from the same respective apple” (Bernard & Liu, 2017).
The experience that one has while eating food is first affected by lower-order thinking, or the information that is taken in through the sensory inputs, such as sight, smell and taste. It can then be affected by higher-order thinking, which brings in past experiences, thoughts, and previous knowledge. Companies exploit this through their advertisement, whether it be the ads that they have on TV with sports heroes, the labeling and the packaging of the product. These different advertisements effect the experiences that people have eating the specific foods.
Works Cited
Anderson, E. C., & Barrett, L. F. (2016, August 24). Affective Beliefs Influence the Experience of Eating Meat. Retrieved from PLOS ONE: https://blackboard.towson.edu/courses/1/1174TSEM102023/db/_5708686_1/embedded/Affective%20Beliefs%20Influence%20the%20Experience%20of%20Eating%20Meat.pdf
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions are Made. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Bernard, J. C., & Liu, Y. (2017, May 10). Food Quality and Preference. Retrieved from Elsivier: https://blackboard.towson.edu/courses/1/1174TSEM102023/db/_5735174_1/embedded/Are%20beliefs%20stronger%20than%20taste_A%20field%20experiment%20on%20organic%20and%20local%20apples.pdf
Yu, J. (. (2012, May 14). ScienceDirect. Retrieved from Science Direct: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666312001730?_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_origin=gateway&_docanchor=&md5=b8429449ccfc9c30159a5f9aeaa92ffb