There is strong evidence that people eat more when eating with friends and family, relative to when eating alone. This is known as the ‘social facilitation of eating’. In this review, we discuss several gaps in the current scientific understanding of this phenomenon, and in doing so, highlight important areas for future research. In particular, we discuss the need for research to establish the longer-term consequences of social eating on energy balance and weight gain, and to examine whether people are aware of social facilitation effects on their own food intake. We also suggest that future research should aim to establish individual and contextual factors that moderate the social facilitation of eating (e.g. sex/gender), and it should clarify how eating socially causes people to eat more. Finally, we propose a novel evolutionary framework in which we suggest that the social facilitation of eating reflects a behavioural strategy that optimises the evolutionary fitness of individuals who share a common food resource.

有强有力的证据表明，与朋友和家人一起吃饭时，人们比单独吃饭时吃得更多。这被称为“饮食的社会促进”。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了当前对这一现象的科学理解中的几个差距，并在此过程中突出了未来研究的重要领域。特别是，我们讨论了研究的必要性，以确定社交饮食对能量平衡和体重增加的长期影响，并检查人们是否意识到社会促进对他们自己食物摄入的影响。我们还建议，未来的研究应该旨在建立缓和饮食的社会便利性的个体和背景因素（例如性/性别），并且应该阐明如何社交饮食会导致人们吃得更多。最后，我们提出了一个新的进化框架，在该框架中，我们建议饮食的社会促进反映了一种行为策略，该策略优化了共享共同食物资源的个体的进化适应性。