Food sharing and feeding another person suggest intimacy; two studies of American college students
✍ Scribed by Lisa Miller; Paul Rozin; Alan Page Fiske
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 174 KB
- Volume
- 28
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0046-2772
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Ethnographic work indicates that food transfer has social signi®cance, but food transfer has not previously been considered as a nonverbal communication channel. We categorize social food transfer along two dimensions: nature of the behaviour in the transfer (X shares food with or feeds Y), and the state of the food transferred (Y's food never contacted by X, or Y's food previously bitten/tasted/touched by X; we call the latter food consubstantiation (shared substance)). These two dimensions generate the four conditions investigated in this study: no sharing, sharing, sharing with consubstantiation, and feeding. The social signi®cance of these types of situations was assessed in two ways. American college students indicated in a questionnaire both the extent to which they transfer food within dierent relationships, and what they took to be normative among American college students. Second, a dierent group of students participated in an Asch impression study in which they observed a videotape of two young adults of opposite sex eating at a restaurant, with the variable across subjects being the four conditions designated above. Viewers were asked to assess the relationship between the young adults, and to rate the degree of intimacy between the adults in terms of mutual feelings and acts of intimacy (e.g. sharing drinks, touching, having sexual relations). Results from both studies are congruent, and indicate that sharing implies a positive/friendly social relationship, and feeding implies a stronger, often romantic relationship. Consubstantiation superimposed on sharing modestly increased judgments of intimacy and closeness of relationship.