Context‐sensitive thinking influences judgments of expected satiation from combinations of foods: The role of individual and cultural variations

Prior research has suggested the influence of thinking styles in judgments of foods, with individual and cultural differences. Here, we tested whether context sensitivity may influence judgments of a food's basic characteristics (e.g., expected satiation) in the presence of other foods in the surrounding context. Given their greater sensitivity to contextual information, participants from Singapore (compared with the USA) perceived central/focal food items as more satiating when surrounded by other foods that were low (vs. high) in expected satiation—a tendency positively correlated with measures of holistic and interdependent thinking styles (Study 1). Judgments of a central food were influenced by the foods surrounding it when participants had been experimentally primed into high context sensitivity (vs. low context sensitivity) (Study 2). These findings reveal that context‐sensitivity may contribute to the emergence of individual and cultural diversity in consumers' perceptions and judgments about multiple foods that are encountered together. Practical Applications Although context sensitivity is well known for its implications on perceptions and judgments, rarely has it been extended to judgments of food—a domain of everyday life with numerous health implications. We demonstrate how context sensitivity may guide food judgments in the presence of multiple discrete food items in the surrounding context (e.g., a multi‐food meal or display). We show that context sensitivity, both as a tendency that varies across cultures and as a situationally malleable style of cognition, may lead to evaluations of a focal food item in a group being influenced by perceived characteristics of surrounding foods. Given its cultural variance and situational malleability, context sensitivity may be a promising consumer‐oriented target when designing food‐related environments (e.g., food displays or mealscapes), especially in cultures which place greater emphasis on contextual information as a routine in daily thought.