Same food - a recipe for trust and cooperation

How to establish mutual understanding with a girl on a first date or to unite a work team? Colleagues will give a lot of advice on this subject, but most likely they will lose sight of one rather simple technique, the effectiveness of which is now scientifically proven .

Researchers at the University of Chicago conducted a series of experiments to determine if there is a correlation between choosing the same food and a sense of trust and intimacy between adults. The results of the study were published on June 25, 2016 in the journal Journal of Consumer Psychology .

It is intuitively clear that if people want to be similar to each other, if they show empathy, if they show the same habits, hobbies and so on - such people feel more trust and closeness to each other. But even the most “intuitive” statements require scientific verification.

Recently, scientists have shown that joint laughter is an extremely important “social glue” that allows you to build intra-group relationships. If a person laughs at your jokes, then he feels sympathy for you.

Choosing the same food plays a similar role. During the first experiment, experts from the University of Chicago randomly assigned participants to the experiment in pairs, where they played an investment game - a standard scientific method for measuring confidence. The participants in this game determine the amount of money that they are willing to share with a partner. Under the terms of the experiment, this money is "invested", that is, doubled. The investor does not have a guarantee that the recipient will return some part of the amount back. He has the right not to return anything at all. Therefore, the investor determines how much money to allocate for the investment to the partner with an unknown outcome, and which part is guaranteed to be kept at home. Accordingly, the amount of money a participant is willing to give to a stranger indicates the degree of trust between them.

During the experiment, some couples were offered to eat the same sweets, while others were different. Accordingly, two experimental groups were formed, the results of which could be compared with the third control group, which did not receive sweets.

The experiment showed that the maximum degree of trust is established between participants who ate the same candy in advance.

In the second experiment, scientists set the task of confirming the effect of the same food on increasing the degree of confidence. Here they used a different verification method. Participants in pairs did not cooperate, but opposed each other in the “labor contract negotiations”. Before the start of negotiations, some couples were given the same food, while other couples were given different food. The result was even more impressive: couples with the same food reached an agreement almost twice as fast as those who ate different foods.

“People tend to think that they make decisions using logic, and they often don’t realize that eating habits can affect their thinking,” saysAyelet Fishbach, professor at the business school at the University of Chicago. “At the most basic level, food can be used for the strategic purpose of helping people collaborate and build trust.”

Such techniques are easy to apply in practice. For example, at large business meetings or in working cafeterias, you can limit the possible range of dishes, pushing people to choose the same food. Theoretically, this should increase the efficiency of work in the company due to greater trust and cooperation.

For personal purposes, men and women can use this technique, for example, on a date, or for reconciliation after a quarrel. Of course, it is advisable to use such techniques only after notifying the partner in advance, otherwise it will be manipulation.

The scientific article “A recipe for friendship: Similar food consumption promotes trust and cooperation” will be published in the January issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology (doi: 10.1016 / j.jcps.2016.06.003), while an unedited manuscript is available online for $ 35.95 or for free .


Having proved the correlation between choosing the same food and trust, scientists tried to find the same influence of other factors. For example, in one of the experiments, an outside observer had to evaluate how much people in shirts of the same color and different colors trust each other. It turned out that the influence of color choice on the degree of confidence is much less than the influence of food choice.

“I think that food is so important because it is something that we take into the body and we need to have confidence in order to do this,” says Professor Fischbach. “I hope our research will help bring people together and will help resolve conflict situations.” In the future, scientists want to check how the act of sharing food affects one degree of confidence when one person gives part of his portion to another.