SAY SORRY EVERYONE, the hipsters were right all along.
Scientists have proven that photographing your food and posting it to Instagram makes it taste that so much better.
In fact, doing anything to ‘celebrate’ the food makes it more enjoyable, including singing Happy Birthday or raising a glass in its presence.
Of course, all of this pales in comparison to the satisfaction of taking out your phone, selecting that perfect filter and choosing just the right angle before snapping that food porn.
The science of it all is that performing a ritual before ingesting the food heightens your awareness of it, hence the onslaught of food photos. If you get even a subconscious reward from the ritual–instagraming it–you’re more likely to do it over and over and over and over and over again.
The study’s main findings include:
participants who engaged in ritualized behaviour, compared with those who did not, evaluated chocolate as more flavourful, valuable, and deserving of behavioural savouring.
a delay between a ritual and the opportunity to consume heightens enjoyment, which attests to the idea that ritual behaviour stimulates goal-directed action.
performing a ritual oneself enhances consumption more than watching someone else perform the same ritual, suggesting that personal involvement is crucial for the benefits of rituals to emerge.
rituals enhance the enjoyment of consumption because of the greater involvement in the experience that they prompt.
Great news for everyone.
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