Love enhances flavours, reduces pain
Science has uncovered the reason mom’s cooking tastes better than everyone else’s: turns out, you can taste the love that went into it.
Reporting in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, a Canadian researcher finds that when we believe there are good intentions behind something, it improves our experience of it. Across a variety of experiments, perceived kindness was not only found to enhance flavour but also to heighten pleasure and to reduce pain.
“Our physical experience of the world doesn’t just depend on physical parameters; it also depends on the interpersonal context of the stimuli,” says author Kurt Gray, a Calgarian working as a social psychologist at the University of Maryland. “In other words, our social world impacts our physical world in a really fundamental way.”
In his first experiment, Gray tested the power of good intentions on people’s experience of pain, by way of short electrical shocks. One group was led to believe participants were being hurt accidentally; another group, that it was being shocked maliciously; and a final group, that the shock was being delivered benevolently, to help those in the group win money. The latter group reported lower pain ratings than either of the other two groups.
“Oftentimes, we have to harm others for their own good,” says Gray, citing such examples as medical procedures, giving a child medicine or even consensual sexual masochism. “Letting someone know you’re doing it in their best interest can actually reduce the pain you cause.”
A second experiment looked at the effect of perceived good intentions on pleasure, via massage. In this test, reported enjoyment increased when the otherwise- identical massage was thought to be administered by a caring partner, as opposed to one administered mechanically. “It’s part of why buying a prostitute wouldn’t be as fulfilling. You know they’re not doing it for you, they’re doing it for money,” says Gray, director of the Maryland Mind Perception and Morality Lab.
A final experiment examined how perceived kindness affected taste, by way of a gift of candy with a note attached.
For the benevolent group, the message read: “I picked this just for you. Hope it makes you happy.” The indifferent group, by contrast, received a note claiming the candy was chosen randomly, with no care put into the selection.
In line with the previous experiments, the candy eaten by the benevolent group not only tasted better, it also was perceived as tasting sweeter.
“It’s like those Werther’s Original commercials from back in the day, where [ the candies] tasted amazing because they came from Grandpa,” says Gray, laughing. “They never tasted that good coming out of a bowl at the doctor’s office.”
Though he cites additional implications for relationships, parenting and business, Gray suggests one of the most significant may be for religion. He notes that a faithful person who attributes traumatic events to a benevolent God, for example, should theoretically hurt less than those who attribute them to a vengeful God.
“If you get diagnosed with a disease, you can see it as punishment for something you’ve done or you can just see it as God’s way of trying to make you a better person,” says Gray. “Each of those interpretations can actually change our experience of the pain.”