Justified indulgence: self-licensing effects on caloric consumption

Abstract

Objective: Research on self-licensing, i.e. employing justifications to give into temptation, largely consists of studies examining dichotomous food choices (healthy vs. unhealthy), while evidence for its effects on how much (unhealthy) food is consumed remains scarce. The present studies aimed to demonstrate self-licensing effects on caloric consumption in both lab (Study 1 & 2) and field setting (Study 3).

Design: In all studies, female student samples were recruited. They either received a justification cue (license condition) or not (control condition), after which they could eat freely from unhealthy snacks (Study 1, N = 85 and Study 2, N = 95) or choose a snack for direct consumption at a take-out lunch place (Study 3, N = 110).

Main outcome measures: Caloric value of consumed snacks (Study 1 and 2) and chosen snack (Study 3).

Results: In all studies, caloric consumption was higher in the license condition compared to the control condition: Participants ate more of the provided unhealthy snacks (Study 1 and 2) and chose a snack of higher caloric value (Study 3).

Conclusions: The present research corroborates self-licensing as an important factor in the consumption of unhealthy foods by employing more ecologically valid outcomes.

Keywords:

• Self-licensing
• justification
• temptation
• food consumption
• indulgence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Due to a procedural error, the following variables are missing for six participants: Age, self-reported BMI, weight loss goal, and restrained eating.

2 There was one participant with a BMI of 41.52 (> 3 SD above the mean), who wanted to lose 40 kg of body weight. Excluding this participant resulted in similar outcomes.

3 A square root transformation was performed to deal with the skewed distribution and outliers. For sake of clarity, untransformed results are reported.

4 A pilot test was performed to verify that the manipulation of task difficulty did not affect perceived depletion of self-control resources (i.e. impairment of the ability to self-regulate; e.g. Baumeister & Vohs, 2007). It has been demonstrated that not actual depletion, but perceived availability of mental resources predicts task performance (Clarkson, Hirt, Jia, & Alexander, 2010). Hence, it was first verified that the effort exerted on the task would be perceived as low or high depending in comparison to an alternative task, but not in terms of absolute effort. A sample of 67 participants with a mean age of 21.84 (SD = 1.93; range 18 to 27) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (high effort condition, n = 24; low effort condition, n = 20; control condition; n = 23). After doing the writing task they filled out the 25-item State Self-Control Scale (α = .93; Ciarocco, Twenge, Muraven, & Tice, 2010). Participants reported a mean level of self-control of 4.82 (SD = .79). An ANOVA with condition as independent variable and state self-control scores as dependent variable revealed no differences between conditions, F (2, 64) = 1.02, p = .365. Hence, the alternative explanation – that differences between conditions are caused by a variance in state self-control levels as a result of the manipulation – was ruled out.

5 Because of the use of paper questionnaires, there were some missing values; one for self-assessed BMI, one for eating concerns, and five for snack liking.

6 Based on N = 94, as sixteen participants did not report their current weight.

7 Based on N = 103, as for seven participants the time of the survey was not registered.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under Research Talent Grant #406-13-010.