MO.4: Deep Dive – Hungry for More: When Your Stomach Craves a Snack and Your Brain Craves Paper Clips

Approximate reading time: 3 minutes

Imagine you’re really hungry, like you’ve missed lunch and it’s way past dinner time. Now, if someone offered you a snack, you’d probably jump at the chance to eat it, right? But what if instead of a snack, they offered you something totally unrelated to food, like a pack of paper clips? Surprisingly, when you’re hungry, you might find yourself more interested in grabbing those non-food items too. This is what researchers call the “spillover effect” of hunger.

A study done by Xu, Schwarz, & Wyer in 2015 found something pretty interesting about hunger. When people are hungry, not only do they want to eat food, but they also have a stronger desire to get their hands on things that aren’t food at all, like paper clips in the study. The hungry participants were more likely to take more of these clips than those who weren’t hungry, even though those clips couldn’t do anything to satisfy their hunger.

So, why does this happen? It seems that when we’re hungry, our brain’s drive to acquire things kicks into high gear, not just for food but for anything. It’s like our brain says, “I need food,” but it also gets a bit mixed up and adds, “and while we’re at it, let’s grab other stuff too.” The catch is, even though hungry people might grab more non-food items, they don’t necessarily like those items any more than they would if they weren’t hungry. They just have a stronger urge to collect things.

For psychology students, this spillover effect is a cool example of how a basic biological need, like hunger, can influence our behaviour in unexpected ways. It shows that our motivations aren’t always straightforward or limited to directly solving our immediate needs. Hunger doesn’t just make us seek food; it can make us want to acquire more stuff in general. This insight helps us understand the complex ways our physical states, like being hungry, can affect our actions and decisions, even in areas not directly related to those states.