What will you do if you are hungry? Obviously, eat, right and that’s it? Nope. Apparently, when we are hungry for food, our brains get hungry too and conquer some desire for things other than food.
Observe how many times in a day you hear yourself or others say “I am hungry.” I am guessing that we Pinoys say this more than most. If you have to go out to eat and have to also stroll through many stores that sell non-food items, chances are, you would want to get these items too compared to seeing them when you are not hungry. I am beginning to suspect this is why many food courts are on top floors – so that you get to scan the shops first before you get to fill your hunger.
A set of 5 very interesting studies that looked at hunger would be very potent in the hands of mall owners and marketers. They all prove that being hungry makes you want to be filled with not just food.
The first one proved that when you are hungry, you can identify not just hunger-related words such as “famine” or “starve” flashed on the screen words but also “acquisition” related words such as “acquire, want, get, have, own, obtain, desire, gain, and possess” compared to other neutral words. This means that when you are hungry, your intelligence is very focused on “having” and “getting”.
The second study proved that being hungry makes you want more food and non-food items. This means that compared to people who are not hungry, you would be likelier to also want that bag you just saw on the shopping window or that new tool being demonstrated by the diligent marketer.
The third and fourth studies are already translations which merchants I think may value. These studies found that those who are hungry actually get the non-food items even if they do not like them and even more, the fifth study showed that they will get those non-food items even if they have to pay for them! Think of those pre-meal hours when people are really hungry an on their way to restaurants. Would your chances to sell them stuff, including real estate which abound now, skyrocket when you approach them during these hungry intervals? What is the “limit” to these “non-food” items that we are willing to pay for when we are hungry? The studies did not explore these yet.
The researchers noted that these findings should alert us that this “overflow” of hunger to non-food things may also go the other way. It means that those who buy more stuff may also end up spending for more food than they need that may end up as waste or even mess your finances.
So how could we trick our brains then to stop being so hungry about everything? There was a study I came across before that when you start imagining eating so much of the food you like, then you will lower your desire to eat that food. Maybe it will apply to imagining non-food items. For me, in those dignified times that I win over my acquisitive spirit, it was when I think of how much stuff one can accumulate so fast. It also helps when you think about moving houses and having to worry about packing so much.
The book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo which is about how to get rid of stuff and reorganize what is left, has been among the top New York Times bestseller for a while now. That gives you would have an idea that many people must have a lot of stuff they want to get rid of. That made me wonder how much of those stuff was acquired when they were hungry for food.
I have been reading on how malls are focusing on more than just the shopping experience so that they offer a variety of other things that appeal to multiple human interests. I think malls are the most obvious translation of the empire that hunger seems to be when it comes to its mastery over our desires and action. I think the diversity of experiences that malls offer match the acquisitive spirit of the hunger empire within each of us. It also is worrying to see how greed is also naturally wired in us, intertwined with the fundamentals – hunger and thirst.
So that is how hunger and malls work for each other. We buy one, we buy them all. Or at least, we want to. That is how a hungry brain works so let’s be careful what you feed it. – Rappler.com