Eat, Drink, and be Monitored

Ponca City, We Love You writes "A new restaurant has opened at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, fitted with a control center and two dozen hidden cameras devoted to exploring the question of what makes people eat and drink the way they do. Over the next 10 years, a team of more than 20 scientists will use the research facility to watch how people walk through the restaurant, what food catches their eye, whether they always sit at the same table and how much food they throw away. Researchers will examine environmental influences on eating behavior by making small changes in the color of the lights, in accompanying sounds, in the scents or the furniture. "We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel," said one researcher. "This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse." University staff who want to eat at the new restaurant will have to sign a consent form agreeing to be watched."

Comments

Big question to be solved?

[foobsr]

Does THC increase or diminish food intake?

CC.

on privacy

[j_166]

I don't really see the privacy implications. Presumably, those going to this research facility to eat know that its a research facility. They have to sign a consent form. The title of the article should be "Eat, Drink, and Participate in Food Science Research", but I guess "Eat, Drink, and Be Monitored" just sounds more Orwellian.

Re:on privacy

[the_humeister]

It's just to get people riled up to click on the link so that they'll hopefully RTFA and then write a post about how the title is misleading...

Re:on privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there is a sign on the door...

Having the experience of living in the Netherlands as foreigner for the last 5 years or so, I can tell you that the tolerance and support for surveillance in this country is scary. Very scary.

It comes AFAIK from a tradition of religious control, where people's lives were very closely followed by the religious. Go to any village in this country, and you will only see houses with huge windows and without curtains.

Nowadays everybody supports more cameras in the street.

This country has a culture of peer monitoring of behaviour, and peer "active" enforcing of acceptable behaviour (normally through the waving of a censoring finger, while preaching). Everybody watches everybody, and everyone will point in a censor-like way, to anyone not acting normally. This is no joke. The saying is "act normally" ("Doet normaal!"), for anyone doing anything nor conforming to "morally & socially" approved behaviour.

I could go on... but I better not.

if you know

[Turn-X Alphonse]

But if you know you're being watched won't it effect how you act?

If that woman knows someone is watching her she might resist eating that extra few fries, but if she isn't she might just go get another bag cause she's had a shitty day.

Re:if you know

[CapsaicinBoy]

Disclaimer: IAAFS

Without meaning to be rude, you are flat out wrong. It just so happens that I study ingestion behavior for a living. My work is more related to the genetics of eating behavior and food choice, so this facility is less directly useful to me personally, but it absolutely will move the field forward. Unlike armchair quarterbacks that take cheapshots on the intarweb, every practicing scientist recognizes the inherent tradeoffs between experimental control and generalizability.

First, before the Correlation !=Causation weenies get their panties in a bunch, I'm happy for you that you passed stats 101, but you need to understand that RCTs are not the only way to do science. Yes, randomization is really nice for making claims about causation, but at least in humans, I can't assign you a specific gene (TAS2R38) or personality trait (novelty seeking). Yet we can still use the scientific method to make predictions based on theory and test those predictions.

Second, much of this work is done today using self report. Certainly, observation can induce bias, but so can self-report. When separate methods, with separate flaws confirm the same findings, science moves forward.

Finally, your comment about blinds, controls and isolation of variables is totally ignorant. The ability to manipulate this artificial restaurant in ways you could never manipulate a real restaurant is *exactly* what provides those controls.

Here is an example. Imagine I have a theory how socialization influences the time people spent at the table and the amount they consume. In this restaurant, I can manipulate the table size (2 vs. 4 chairs), social attachment between people (sit with friends or random assignment) or gender (do women eat more or less when seated with random men, male friends, just women, etc) to test my theories.

Wait just a minute!

[NetSettler]

We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse.

They have the ability to just ask waitstaff to be more friendly or visible and thereby cause it to just happen??? Forget the rest of the research, this one technique is wholly unknown to and long sought by restaurants everywhere. They should just publish how they manage that trick and call it a day!

Better still, patent it, and retire wealthy.

Re:Scum

[Albanach]

Nonsense, they don't care about the individual, they care about statistically significant shifts in the group.

Think about it, if burgundy carpets makes ten percent of the customers purchase a more expensive salad, and with no identifiable negatives, then it makes sense to install burgundy carpets if they want to shift more of these salads. It doesn't matter that it has no effect on 90% of the customers - indeed they would be well aware that it has no effect on them.

Stores run promotions all the time that are aimed at shifting a tiny proportion of their customers to a more expensive product. It doesn't work for the majority, but increasing your profit per customer for even a small proportion makes sense if you can do it without detriment to the majority of your customer base.

Similarly, while you may guess at why people made a choice, there's no need to know exactly why, just that you can record a statistically significant shift in their patters when you change one stimuli.

In response to the "wasteofmoney" tag

[QuantumFTL]

No this isn't research into space, into sexy supercomputing clusters, or other far-flung reaches of technology. This is research into basic elements of human behavior - indeed elements with a very strong environmental impact. Technology cannot solve all of our problems, it cannot solve the human condition. Part of fixing the ills in our society (and those we inflict on our supporting biosphere) is to learn how to subconsciously promote better behavior on the part of everyone. Small changes, done across the board, can make great gains - and much of these benefits "stack" with benefits from new technology.

So don't knock this research until you've looked at the numbers - according to this article in 1997, Americans threw away (for one reason or another) 27% of edible food, that's 96 *billion* pounds, which is ~400 pounds per person, per year! Sure, this occurs at many stages, but each stage can be improved.

I am sure that these tapes will be studied years later by linguists, behaviorists, game theorists, businessmen and efficiency specialists. Besides, with research, we never know what we're going to learn until we try.