You’ve probably heard the classic advice: don’t go grocery shopping on an empty stomach, because you’ll leave with way more food than you meant to buy. According to the study, ‘Hunger promotes acquisition of nonfood objects,’ published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that pull doesn’t stop at the snack aisle. Researchers Alison Jing Xu, Norbert Schwarz, and Robert Wyer Jr. found in five different tests that hunger can also make people grab things that have nothing to do with food at all, from binder clips to USB drives.
The paper reports five experiments with 379 participants, including a series of word-flash experiments, product-evaluation studies, and a field experiment. Across them, hunger increased people's desire for food and nonfood items, while having little effect on simple liking judgements.
Why does an empty stomach make you want stuff in general
Hunger does more than just make food look good, the researchers say. It also puts the brain in a general learning mode, as the search and reach for food is part of the hunger response. According to this study, in the first experiment, 69 participants briefly saw words flash on a screen and had to identify them. Those who were hungrier were faster at correctly identifying words about the acquisition of things (want, gain, obtain) and words about hunger itself, but hunger did not affect how well they identified neutral words that were unrelated. That difference suggested hunger was prompting a broader urge to acquire things, not just food.
