Could eating soft food make people more trusting than eating hard food?

Details

The researchers tested whether a food’s texture could influence social behavior through a connection between physical softness and being soft-hearted. In the actual-eating study, participants who ate soft food showed greater interpersonal trust and donated more time to charity than those who ate hard food. The findings suggested that soft food increased trust, rather than hard food reducing it.

A separate study asked participants to imagine eating. Stronger imagined sensory qualities of hard food, such as dryness, predicted lower trust. This was an association involving imagined sensations, not evidence from actual eating.

Together, the studies offer initial support for a link between food texture and social responses, but the effects were modest. The abstract does not report sample sizes, participant characteristics or whether the changes lasted.