Recent studies have shown that people can believe that unhealthy foods taste better, even if healthy and unhealthy foods are equally as tasty. Specifically, when tasty and unhealthy foods are frequent in one context but rare in another, people perceive unhealthy foods to taste better, even if health and taste are unrelated. Given that people often consume food in one context, the current study investigated whether false beliefs about the health-taste relationship in foods can also occur in just one single context, in which either healthy or unhealthy foods are predominant, when there is no contrasting context where the respective other food is predominant. In two experiments ( = 342), we presented participants with pictures of meals from a single context and varied the frequency of healthy and unhealthy foods between participants. Although healthy and unhealthy foods tasted equally as good, participants believed that (un)healthy foods tasted better when there were more of them. This research demonstrates that health-taste beliefs might be changed by increasing the relative frequency of healthy foods in the environment overall, not by just offering some healthy and tasty foods.

中文翻译：

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眼见为实：消费者错误地认为不健康的食品越多味道越好

最近的研究表明，人们可能相信不健康的食物味道更好，即使健康和不健康的食物同样美味。具体来说，当美味和不健康的食物在一种情况下很常见，但在另一种情况下很少见时，人们就会认为不健康的食物味道更好，即使健康和味道无关。鉴于人们经常在一种环境下消费食物，当前的研究调查了在没有对比环境的情况下，关于食物健康与口味关系的错误信念是否也可能发生在一种环境中，其中健康或不健康的食物占主导地位其中相应的其他食物占主导地位。在两个实验 (= 342) 中，我们向参与者展示了来自单一背景的膳食图片，并改变了参与者吃健康和不健康食物的频率。尽管健康和不健康的食物味道一样好，但参与者认为，（不）健康的食物越多味道越好。这项研究表明，通过增加整体环境中健康食品的相对频率，而不是仅仅提供一些健康美味的食物，可以改变健康口味观念。