The Eyes have it, the Eyes have it
Beauty is in the eye… [partial quotation] You sit down to enjoy a bowl of soup. You take a spoonful. Slurp. Delicious! This is a bowl of soup you can get behind. You have another spoon. And another. And another. When is it time to stop? How do you know when you’ve had enough? In the mid 2000s, Brian Wansink’s research group wanted to know if people listen to their stomachs when deciding when to finish eating, or if something else helps them make the decision. They designed a dastardly experiment. They invited participants to come and have a discussion about how colour affects taste, and sat them at a table with a bowl of tomato soup in each place and a cauldron of soup in the middle. The participants were invited to scoff as much soup as they wanted whilst they had this decoy discussion about colour and taste. Unbeknownst to half of the participants, their bowls were connected from the bottom to the big soup cauldron by rubber tubing, perfectly designed so that as they wer...