Go shopping hungry, a bad idea

Hunger and shopping, a bad combination

We should be grateful to popular wisdom for providing us with valuable pieces of information that have allowed us to come of age. adult avoiding unnecessary falls by embankments, contagion of diseases or, who knows, even the occasional kick of horse.

And it is that, long before there were publications in scientific journals, the collective body to which we belong and to which We call "people" and had in mouth a lot of advice, sayings and customs that guide us on our vital path to old age prosperous. However, it should be remembered that, precisely because it does not depend on science, popular culture does not have to tread fine in its explanations of reality.

There is an advice repeated many times in which this becomes evident: the recommendation not to go to the supermarket on an empty stomach. Today we know that well-meaning mentors who repeated this rule were naive. Shopping hungry is a bad idea, yes. But not only when we go to look for food at the market

, but also when we walk through the galleries of any other type of commercial establishment.

Hunger and the desire to buy came together

A study recently published in PNAS has concluded that appetite can activate concepts and conduct related to "acquisition" in abstract. That makes those who feel closer to the purring of the stomach more likely to buy anything by being carried away by an impulse. Hunger and rational shopping don't seem to get along very well, whatever the context.

How could this conclusion be reached? Well, for example, experimenting with an object that is difficult to use in our daily lives and rather little related to gastronomy: the binder clip, also known as a binder clip. It is a small device that could well be the older brother of the conventional clip and that serves to hold many papers. In this way, a research team set out to measure the number of binder clips that a series of volunteers picked up when told that they could take as many as they wanted home with them.

The volunteers, of course, were part of two different experimental groups: hungry people and satiated people. Hungry subjects tended to catch significantly more clips, but despite showing this hobby spontaneous for office objects, they did not value their loot in a more positive way than the group of people sated. It seems that hunger sends a unambiguous message to the brain without subtleties. He does not say "this is very attractive to me" or "how beautiful this is" and he does not even say "I want food." The message is more, well: "I want".

Now, it must be remembered that this experiment was carried out with objects that were free. What happens when money comes into play? You might think that when acquiring something has a cost, we let reason take the reins of the matter, right? To find out this point, data was collected in a commercial area. By scanning the purchase receipts of customers who had come to checkout and asking them a series of questions, it was possible to see how hungry people tended to buy more, even taking into account their mood and the time they had spent looking at products.

Don't fall for the trap

What lessons can we learn from the relationship between paper clips and stomach issues? Perhaps, the following: given that in the outside world we are daily bombarded by advertising in all kinds of formats, it is convenient not make it so easy to the big sellers. Let's not put in our body, in addition to all the things we already have, the desire to buy anything.