How do you like your burger?

Hamburger hazards and emotions

by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research 

Comes news about how some people in some places react to hypothetical questions about photographs of hamburgers. The study, freshly published online, is:

“Hamburger hazards and emotions,” Nina Veflen Olsen, Elin Røssvoll, Solveig Langsrud, Joachim Scholderer, Appetite, vol. 78, 1 July 2014, pp. 95–101. (Thanks to @Neuro_Skeptic for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Nofima, Oslovn, Norway and Aarhus University, Denmark explain:

“Previous studies indicate that many consumers eat rare hamburgers and that information about microbiological hazards related to undercooked meat not necessarily leads to more responsible behavior.

“With this study we aim to investigate whether consumers’ willingness to eat hamburgers depends on the emotions they experience when confronted with the food. A representative sample of 1046 Norwegian consumers participated in an online experiment….

“The respondents were instructed to imagine that they were served the hamburger… We analyzed the data by means of a multivariate probit model and two linear fixed-effect models.

“The results show that confrontation with rare hamburgers evokes more fear and disgust than confrontation with well-done hamburgers, that all hamburgers trigger pleasure and interest, and that a consumer’s willingness to eat rare hamburgers depends on the particular type of emotion evoked.”

Here’s detail from the study:

- See more at: http://www.improbable.com/#sthash.94LnAq4q.dpuf