Wall Street Journal features USC healthy eating study

USC Marshall’s Linda Hagen spoke with the Wall Street Journal about her recent study that shows that simply serving yourself can curb unhealthy indulgence. People who choose their own piece of cake—or, even better, cut it themselves—eat less of it.
Those are the findings of five experiments with a total of over 800 participants by Dr. Hagen and two co-authors, to be published later this year in the Journal of Marketing Research. The experiments found that the less involved people are in serving unhealthy foods, the more likely they are to eat them—and to eat larger portions.
“If they’re served by someone else, they can outsource responsibility to someone else,” says Dr. Linda Hagen, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “But if they serve themselves, they have to accept responsibility and that makes them feel bad.”
Read the full article: Want to Avoid Munching on Unhealthy Foods? Serve Yourself (Wall Street Journal)