Sensory Perception of Identical Foods

As most everyone has heard by now, researchers recently found that children who were presented with foods in packaging labeled with McDonald's logos often reported that those foods tasted superior to identical foods in plain wrappers. Hence, McDonald's is exploiting children with insidious branding, taking advantage of the fact that kids are unable to distinguish advertising claims from fact, and generally being an evil, profit-mongering corporation.

I have some methodological issues with this research - such as, is it really appropriate to cue your subjects by opening the experiment by asking them (I don't recall the verbatim wording from the article) "Do you know which of this food is from McDonald's?" and saying "Yes, that is correct" to the ones who point to the Golden Arches wrapper and "This one is" (pointing out the one in the McD's wrapper) to the kids who don't. The researchers made an express effort to make the McDonald's food salient (stand out such that this fact is highly accessible in memory and likely to be considered in the evaluative task) to the subjects and by implication, suggested that the food not in the McDonald's wrapper was not from McDonald's, thus increasing the likelihood that the kids would perceive taste differences that did not exist.

But even to the degree that the findings are valid, what is the big revelation here? Research conducted over the last many decades has consistently found that people are very poor at food discrimination tasks (including wine experts who cannot tell the difference between a red wine and a white wine served at room temperature) and that sensory perception of food is strongly influenced by non-physiological factors, with brand labeling being only one of many.

Yesterday, I read about a 1975 branding experiment in which regular beer drinkers who watched TV ads for obviously fake beer brands and then tasted the four beers labeled with the fake brands from the commercials (but which were all the same product) reported "strong preferences for the brand portrayed as satisfying their individual motivations for alcohol consumption." Further, "all the subjects believed the brands were different and that they could tell the difference between them. Most felt that at least one of the four brands was not fit for human consumption." So even under controlled laboratory conditions, using fake brands with which the subjects had no previous experience (unlike the McDonald's study), people were easily influenced to find taste differences where none objectively existed.

Although this other research is not receiving the press of the McDonald's experiment, recent articles the false inclusion of "soy" on an ingredient list, the use of color as a visual clue in evaluations of orange juice, and the labeling of wine as Californian or North Dakotan, to name just a few, have all been investigating this area. I would love to see a study on taste perceptions of fruit and vegetables presented as organic vs. conventionally grown.

This is an interesting and complex field of study and it appears that there is still much to understand - e.g. the degree to which these perceived (or at least reported) differences in various scenarios are the result of biased perceptual processing, impression management or self-esteem concerns, or cognitive or associatively learned emotional responses.

As for the crazy popularity of McDonald's among children, I read somewhere recently that the primary reason kids like to go there is that their parent is less stressed out and generally more pleasant and affectionate when they are eating at McDonald's than when eating at home. (I cannot vouch for the validity of this claim, since I have forgotten the source and could be demonstrating the sleeper effect here.) If it is true that parents are in better moods and meal-time is nicer when eating at McD's than eating at home, there is little surprise that kids would have a positive emotional response to McD's food that would strengthen brand preference driven by marketing.

I thought this commentary from the article was amusing:

And although the parents hold the keys to the car that goes to the fast-food restaurant, they're not entirely to blame.

"Parents don't choose for their children to be exposed to this type of marketing," he said. "Parents have a very difficult job. It may seem easier to give in to their child's plea to go to McDonald's than to give in to the many other hundreds of requests they get during a day."

So are kids also buying the televisions that they are watching?

Another report on the research states: "Study author Dr. Tom Robinson said the kids' perception of taste was 'physically altered by the branding.' " I'm not quite sure what he means by "physically altered" but this is not at all the way I would describe the effect that occurs. I would save "physically altered" to situations like disabling the sense of smell in rats and studying the effects on taste of food. Even an effect in the perception of taste would not necessarily be physical. Perhaps more than anything else, that statement suggests to me that these clowns don't know what they're talking about. (Ugh, now it's happening to me: all this talk of McDonald's leads to questionable word choice of "clowns." Is anyone safe from the wicked, degrading influence of McD's?)