The ‘foodie call’ seems to be the new dating trend, where people make plans with others simply to meet up and eat. However, a different kind of ‘foodie call’ that’s more suspect also exists — one where individuals use dates just to get a free meal. Researchers at Azusa Pacific University and the University of California Merced decided to delve into the latter definition with a new study.
Still from Netflix’s The Perfect Date
The purpose of the study was to measure how often women use these ‘foodie calls’ and what their general attitude is towards them. Two separate sets of experiments were carried out in order to validate the findings. The first experimented was conducted with 820 women, of which 85% were heterosexual. They were made to answer questions regarding their traits, beliefs about gender roles, and opinion on foodie calls. The experiment was replicated a second time with 357 heterosexual women.
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In both sets, only a minority of respondents had engaged in a foodie call and considered it to be socially acceptable. The study published in the Social Psychological and Personality Science journal found that only 23-33% of women had conducted a foodie call with most of them claiming to do it only occasionally or rarely. Majority of the respondents in general thought a foodie call to be ‘extremely to moderately unacceptable’.
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Importantly, the study discovered that “dark triad” personality traits and beliefs in traditional gender roles were directly linked to women who had either engaged in foodie calls or deemed them acceptable. Dark triad personality traits refer to psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism — things which are tied to “deceptive and exploitative behavior.”
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However, the researchers heavily emphasized the caveat that this study may not be reflective of women as a whole as the women participating in the study did not necessarily represent the general population. Another important distinction is that foodie calls may be made by individuals of any gender.
Do you think a ‘foodie call’ is a justified reason to go out with someone?
