Food Is All Around: How Contexts Create Misbeliefs About the Health–Taste Relationship
通过三项研究（共369名参与者）发现，不同情境中健康与美味食物的出现频率差异，会让人错误地认为健康与味道之间存在负相关，解释了“不健康食物更好吃”这一信念的形成机制。
We investigated a novel cognitive-ecological account for misbeliefs about the relationship between food healthiness and tastiness. We propose that different frequencies of healthy and tasty foods in contrasting contexts can trigger perceptions that health and taste are related in ways that diverge from the actual health–taste correlation in the presented food. To investigate this proposal, we conducted three studies (total N = 369), including a taste test, with adult Prolific academic participants from the United Kingdom and undergraduate psychology students from Austria. Our results showed that different frequencies of healthy and tasty food across contrasting contexts can trigger misbeliefs about the relationship between health and taste. These findings demonstrate that properties of the food ecology combined with basic cognitive processes can help explain the formation of beliefs about food such as that unhealthy food tastes better than healthy food. Our study extends the existing explanations for food beliefs and provides a perspective on how they can be changed.