Using the Self-Referencing Task to Produce Durable Change on Food Evaluations Measured via the IAT

Abstract

In many daily life situations, eating behaviour manifests itself under conditions of automaticity. Associative learning procedures have proven reliable to change food items’ evaluations inferred from performances in indirect tasks, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Targeting two alternative food brands, we investigated the impact of the Self-Referencing (SR) task on IAT performances measured immediately after the manipulation and one week later. Capitalizing on the structural features of the SR task, a first study (N = 145) demonstrated the durable effect of the manipulation on the IAT. An advantage in automatic responding for the snack brand paired with the self was detected right after the SR task and one week later. Instead, the SR manipulation showed no impact on self-reported evaluations. Moreover, a semantic priming task administered right after the SR task indicated response facilitation for the self-related target brand when self-stimuli were used as primes. Experiment 2 (N = 268, pre-registered) targeted two alternative food brands and replicated the lasting effect on the IAT, thus demonstrating the generalizability of the effect. Moreover, we extended the results’ validity by showing that SR can generate a durable effect on a behavioural choice task. We discussed the effectiveness of the SR in producing lasting effects on the IAT and other instances of automatic behavior and the potential implications for research in the food domain.