Delicate dining with a date and burger binging with buddies: impression management across social settings and consumers' preferences for masculine or feminine foods.

Consumers often use their food choices as an impression management strategy to signal desirable aspects about themselves to others, especially in public places like restaurants and cafeterias, where the presence of others can promote certain consumption choices and preference patterns. In mating contexts, people prefer gender-typical traits and characteristics in a potential partner. Food options can also be classified according to their gender typicality, with certain alternatives perceived as feminine (e.g., salad, seafood) and with other options perceived as more masculine (e.g., steak, burger). Drawing on impression management theories from the drinking and dining domain and literature on sex differences in human mate preferences, we present a high-powered experiment investigating whether consumers' preferences for masculine or feminine foods depend on the social setting in which the food consumption takes place: dining with an attractive date (mating) or meeting and eating with friends (non-mating). Participants (N = 162, 46.9% females, 53.1% males; age M = 41.8 years, SD = 14.5) were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions (mating vs. non-mating) and were asked to indicate their food preferences for 15 dishes that differed markedly in perceived femininity/masculinity. Consistent with our theorizing, females (males) generally had a stronger preference for foods perceived as more feminine (masculine), thereby supporting the gender-typicality thesis at the aggregate level. Furthermore, females in the mating condition-but not females in the non-mating condition-reported significantly stronger preferences for more feminine food alternatives. However, in direct contrast to our theorizing, males preferred more masculine meals in the non-mating condition (i.e., when dining with friends), whereas this gender-typical tendency did not emerge in the mating condition (i.e., when dining with an attractive date). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and present a set of fruitful avenues for future research.

Greater traditionalism predicts COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 societies.

People vary both in their embrace of their society's traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations. Additionally, because hazard-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance may hinge on contextually contingent tradeoffs. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a real-world test of the posited relationship between traditionalism and hazard avoidance. Across 27 societies (N = 7844), we find that, in a majority of countries, individuals' endorsement of tradition positively correlates with their adherence to costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors; accounting for some of the conflicts that arise between public health precautions and other objectives further strengthens this evidence that traditionalism is associated with greater attention to hazards.

Populated Places and Conspicuous Consumption: High Population Density Cues Predict Consumers' Luxury-Linked Brand Attitudes.

Population density has been identified as an ecological factor with considerable behavioral implications. The present research aimed to examine whether the mere perception of more (vs. less) populated places can change consumers' luxury-linked brand attitudes. To this end, we experimentally manipulated consumers' perceptions of population density using pictorial exposure to high (vs. low) population density cues. The results revealed a significant interaction between manipulated population density and perceived brand luxury on brand attitudes. Specifically, exposure to high rather than low population density cues resulted in more positive (negative) attitudes toward brands deemed to be more (less) luxurious. These findings support our prediction that high population density cues can shift people's perceptions in consumption contexts linked to luxury. Our work contributes to the growing stream of literature on population density and suggests that this (geo-) demographic factor can exert important downstream effects on consumer behavior.

Development and psychometric evaluation of the Anticipated Food Scarcity Scale (AFSS).

Mass media extensively inform societies about events threatening the global food supply (e.g., pandemics or Brexit). Consumers exposed to such communication may perceive food resources as becoming scarcer. In line with an evolutionary account, these perceptions can shift decision-making in domains such as food preferences or prosociality. However, existing literature has solely focused on actual and past food insecurity experiences threatening mostly low-income families, thus neglecting the future-oriented perceptions among the general population. This paper broadens the food insecurity research scope by developing a new construct-anticipated food scarcity (AFS)-which is defined as the perception that food resources are becoming less available (in the future). We have developed and psychometrically validated the 8-item Anticipated Food Scarcity Scale (AFSS) in eight studies (N = 1333). The 8-item AFSS is unidimensional and has good psychometric qualities. The scale is sensitive to food scarcity cues and, therefore, can be used in experimental research. Moreover, its relatively narrow set of items makes it an exceptionally potent tool for use in online surveys, field settings, and lab studies. Taken together, the AFSS presents an alternative approach to food scarcity measurement in affluent societies and, consequently, can foster novel research on food waste, prosocial behaviors, and other similar topic areas.