We suggested to 228 subjects in two experiments that, as children, they had had negative experiences with a fattening food. An additional 107 subjects received no such suggestion and served as controls. In Experiment 1, a minority of subjects came to believe that they had felt ill after eating strawberry ice cream as children, and these subjects were more likely to indicate not wanting to eat strawberry ice cream now. In contrast, we were unable to obtain these effects when the critical item was a more commonly eaten treat (chocolate chip cookie). In Experiment 2, we replicated and extended the strawberry ice cream results. Two different ways of processing the false suggestion succeeded in planting the false belief and producing avoidance of the food. These findings show that it is possible to convince people that, as children, they experienced a negative event involving a fattening food and that this false belief results in avoidance of that food in adulthood. More broadly, these results indicate that we can, through suggestion, manipulate nutritional selection and possibly even improve health.false memory ͉ nutritional selection ͉ food preferences ͉ suggestion W hat if your first taste of a fattening food, like strawberry ice cream, had caused queasiness? Might you avoid strawberry ice cream now? Although we cannot change the past, we can change how people remember the past. The present work shows how changing memory also can change behavior.

In two experiments, we suggested to 336 participants that as children they had become ill after eating either hard-boiled eggs or dill pickles. Eighty-three additional control participants in Experiment 1 received no suggestion. In both experiments, participants' confidence increased in line with the suggestion. In the second experiment, we used a pretest/posttest design and found that enhanced confidence was accompanied by avoidance of the relevant food item. These results demonstrate that adults can be led to believe falsely that eating certain foods as children made them sick and that such false beliefs can have consequences. "Who. .. can cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast" (from The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, Act I, Scene III).

No abstract

In past research, we planted false memories for food related childhood events using a simple false feedback procedure. Some critics have worried that our findings may be due to demand characteristics. In the present studies, we developed a novel procedure designed to reduce the influence of demand characteristics by providing an alternate magnet for subjects' natural suspicions. We used two separate levels of deception. In addition to giving subjects a typical untrue rationale for the study (i.e., normal deceptive cover story), we built in strong indicators (the "Red Herring") that the study actually had another purpose. Later, we told subjects that we had deceived them, and asked what they believed the "real purpose" of the study was. We also interviewed a subset of subjects in depth in order to analyze their subjective experiences of the procedure and any relevant demand. Our Red Herring successfully tricked subjects, and left little worry that our false memory results were due to demand. This "double cross" technique may have widespread uses in psychological research that hopes to conceal its real hypotheses from experimental subjects.