A new study reveals that most diners feel uncomfortable starting to eat before everyone at the table has been served – although, in reality, the rest almost never mind.
Restaurants and at-home dinner hosts can create more comfortable experiences by ensuring everyone at the table is served at the same timesuggests a new one, recently published in the magazine Appetite.
Almost all of us recognize that typical situation in a restaurant or dinner: our dish arrives, but we hesitate to start because the others are still waiting.
It is deeply rooted custom was the focus of the new study, conducted by researchers from the City University of London, in the United Kingdom, and Tilburg University, in the Netherlands.
The study, which analyzed how people evaluate their behavior in comparison with what they expect from othersshowed that people care much more about breaking this norm when they are themselves to do it than when others do.
The work was based on six distinct experiences. Participants were asked to imagine they were sharing a meal with a friend. In some scenarios, they received their food first; in others, they saw their dining companion being served first.
Who was served first had to indicateon a numerical scale, how long did you think it would take? should I wait or if it would be acceptable to start eating. Whoever was still waiting evaluated what they thought the other should do.
The results revealed a clear lag between how people judge themselves and how they judge others. Whoever was served first thought that should wait significantly longer than what dining partners actually expected.
Additional experiments tried understand why. Participants were asked about chow would they feel if the dining companion started eating or waited, and how they thought that companion would feel if the situation were the opposite.
The results showed that people expected to feel better by waiting – e worse when starting to eat – when they were served first, than they expected others to feel in the same situation.
The study also tested possible interventionssuch as encouraging participants to put themselves in someone else’s shoes or telling them that their partner had explicitly asked them to start eating.
Research suggests that That’s why we continue to encourage others to “break” the norm – and that restaurants should, whenever possible, avoid putting customers in that position.
“The decision about when to start eating in the company of other people is a very common dilemma,” he explains. Janina Steinmetzprofessor of Marketing at City University and co-author of the study, cited by .
“The norm dictates that we wait until all the food is on the table to begin, and ignore it makes us feel rude and discourteous. Surprisingly, this feeling almost doesn’t change even when the other person asks us explicitly to move forward”he adds.
This happens because we have much more access to our feelings internal feelings – such as the need to appear attentive or avoid social discomfort – than to the psychological experiences of others.
In these situations, we should be aware that we are mainly waiting for our own benefit — and that the rest of the table will probably matter much less than we imagine if we decide to start eating, the study authors conclude.
