Sunday, May 20, 2012

The Conclusion Makes Sense but …

According to a recent study, organic food can turn people into obnoxious snobs:

To find out, Eskine and his team divided 60 people into three groups. One group was shown pictures of clearly labeled organic food, like apples and spinach. Another group was shown comfort foods such as brownies and cookies. And a third group -- the controls -- were shown non-organic, non-comfort foods like rice, mustard and oatmeal. After viewing the pictures, each person was then asked to read a series of vignettes describing moral transgressions.

………

"We found that the organic people judged much harder compared to the control or comfort food groups," says Eskine. "On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89."

When it came to helping out a needy stranger, the organic people also proved to be more selfish, volunteering only 13 minutes as compared to 19 minutes (for controls) and 24 minutes (for comfort food folks).

I don't think a study with a sample size of 60 should be taken seriously even if its conclusion (that “organic people” act like jerks) is plausible.

I won't more than mention that it was the sight of the organic food that had the effect, which might have been due to us anti-environmentalists getting p___ed off.