sweet snacks could lead to higher shopping bills (link)
08.09.09 - the local

sometimes i wish i was a full-time researcher dude, someone who gets paid to develop crazy tests & perform them on people. i'd be all "test subject A" & "hypotheses" & "control group" & then i'd peer into people's psyches & come up with conclusions & whatnot. i'd have a sexy assistant & we'd have an on & off relationship, one that'd be characterized by numerous witty arguments where we'd analyze each others' behavior & draw conclusions based on our findings. it'd be hot enough for usa, but not hot enough for hbo.

at germany's friedrichshafen university (also known as "zeppelin university"...their school motto should totally be "we get the led out!"), researchers have used their special research powers to find a link between sweets & shopping. as the local ("germany's news in english") reports, "researchers at friedrichshafen university say eating sweet things makes people more willing to spend money on shopping, after looking at chemical reactions in the body and brain - and their relation to behaviour." see! that's research that i never would have thought to do nor would i have thought was actually necessary, but that's what researchers do!

here's what these researchers did...they gave one group of people sugar water & another group water or nothing at all. then those groups of people were "asked to say whether they felt the prices of a number of everyday shopping items were fair – and if they said no, were asked to name what they felt would be a fair price." the folks with the sugar water rated the prices as fair more often than those in the other group & suggested fair prices that were higher than those given by the non-sugar water folks.

it's all because the sugar led to the brain producing serotonin, which makes people all crazy. regardless, marketing researcher peter kenning said that "supermarkets which might decide to offer shoppers a chocolate bar for free at the door might be wasting their time" and was quoted as saying "i would not go so far as that at the moment. the research into the exact mechanism will keep us busy for a little while yet." that's too bad. i mean, why do research if you can't use it for devious means? you know?