Despite the lack of romantic attraction to a suitor, there are women who would choose to go on a romantic date to receive a free dinner from the suitor. It is what has come to be called Foodie Calls .
Although the idea of the gastronomic call has been debated in the popular media for some time, psychologists Brian Collisson, Jennifer Howell and Trista Harig have been the first to address their study in the following research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science .
Foodie call
The research builds on two studies in which women were surveyed regarding their behavior regarding foddie calls , dark triad personality traits, traditional gender role beliefs, and online dating history.
The research found that between 23% and 33% of the women surveyed had deliberately misrepresented their romantic interest in a man for dinner at his expense.
In Study 1, dark triad beliefs and traditional gender roles significantly predicted foodie calls’ prior behavior and perceived acceptability. Study 2 used more comprehensive measures and suggested again that dark triad traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) predicted foodie calls and their perceived acceptability.
Collisson and his colleagues point out that the author of the foodie can be a man or a woman, and it can happen in both same-sex and opposite-sex contexts . However, it is generally described as the case of a woman who receives a dinner offer from a man and pretends to have a romantic interest just to get a free meal at a good restaurant. For this reason, the researchers only surveyed women who self-identified as heterosexual .
Scoring high on Dark Triad traits means displaying these traits more intensely:
- Machiavellianism . They manipulate and deceive others for their own benefit.
- Psychopathy They lack empathy for the situation of others and do not feel remorse for their own harmful actions.
- Narcissism They have an inflated sense of their own importance and their rights. Also, although they are socially adept, they have little interest in building deep relationships with others.
More than a thousand women completed questionnaires that evaluated the following:
- Frequency of foodie calls . First, they were asked if they had ever participated in a foodie call. If they responded positively, they were asked to estimate how many times they had done so. Finally, they rated the social acceptability of this practice.
- Dark triad . Respondents answered questions on commonly used scales designed to assess the degree of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism.
- Gender role beliefs . The items in this questionnaire assessed respondents’ support for traditional gender roles. Among these, of course, was the belief that it is the man’s duty to pay all expenses on a date.
However, it should be noted that most of the women surveyed did not approve of the foodie calls or were involved in them, as well as some considerations about the study:
The survey was conducted through Amazon Mechanical Turk , the controversial crowdsourcing platform (micro-payments for simple tasks) used mainly by low-income people in the US and India, and may not be based on a heterogeneous sample of women.
The sample size is small.
There were two studies. In one, 23% accepted the foodie call, in the other, 33%. In total, then, 26%.
The three authors of the study belong to an evangelical university of Azusa Pacific University.