Word: actorly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...other new releases fell below even Surrogates' wan totals. Dennis Quaid flopped with Pandorum ($4.4 million), yet another sci-fi movie starring an actor in his mid-50s. Nor is the remake of Fame gonna live forever: its third-place finish of $10 million was one more underperformer. Among the holdovers, only Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself showed any staying power. The Jennifer Aniston romance ($4.3 million) was a box-office wallflower. And how lifeless is the femme horror comedy Jennifer's Body ($3.5 million)? In her host monologue on Saturday Night Live this weekend...
...experiments. In the first, 95 undergraduate women were individually invited to a lab ostensibly to participate in a study about movie viewership. Before the film began, each woman was asked to help herself to a snack of either M&M's or granola. Another "participant," who was actually an actor hired by the research team, grabbed her food first, in full view of the subjects at the snack line. In her natural state, the phony participant weighed 105 lb. and wore a size 0. But in about half the cases, she wore a prosthetic designed by an Academy Award-winning...
Both the fat and the skinny versions of the actor scooped five tablespoons of food (approximately 71 g of granola or 108 g of M&M's) onto a plate. That's a heap. The subjects followed suit, taking more food than they normally would have had they eaten alone. However, the subjects took significantly higher portions when the actor was thin. During the movie - a five-minute clip from the Will Smith film I, Robot - they also ate significantly more if the actor was skinny. "It's our intuition sometimes that you don't want to eat with...
What happens when a thin person takes a small portion? Again, we tend to mimic those around us. For the second test, in one scenario the actor took two pieces of small candy from a set of snack bowls. In the other scenario, she took 30 pieces. Under the lots-of-food condition, the results mimicked the first test: subjects grabbed and ate significantly more candy when the actor was thin. Under the little-food condition, the subjects took the lead of the actor and restrained their candy consumption. However, in this scenario it was the obese lunch date...
Each of these tests illustrates the psychological trait known as anchoring. Humans tend to latch on to one specific piece of information when making decisions, in this case the habits of the actor. The social environment is extremely influential. If this fellow study subject is going to take an above-average number of M&M's, so will I. Call it the "I'll have what she's having" effect. (See pictures of what makes you eat more food...