There may be a number of reasons why it isn't a good thing to get hungry. For one, this can get you in a very bad mood but if you want to make better decisions, a new study suggests doing so with an empty stomach.
Findings of a new research published in the journal PLOS One on Oct. 23 suggest that there is something beneficial with getting hungry: it allows people to make better decisions.
For the new study, Denise de Ridder, from the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology at the Utrecht University in The Netherlands, and colleagues, conducted three experiments involving a group of students to assess whether or not hunger could result in advantageous decision-making.
In all of these experiments, the participants were divided into two groups. Those who were assigned to the fasting group did not eat anything for about 10 hours before taking a test while those in the non-fasting group ate a generous breakfast.
The first and second experiments involved having the participants take the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) psychological test, which stimulates complex decision-making in real life and involves some risks and rewards that are associated with gambling. The researchers observed that the participants in the fasting group did better than those in the non-fasting group being able to understand the patterns of long-term reward.
For the third experiment, the researchers presented the participants with a series of 27 questions that required them to make a choice between receiving a small amount or money at the moment, or a bigger sum in the future. The experiment yielded the same findings observed by the researchers in the first two experiments with those in the fasting group more likely to choose the bigger amount of cash than the participants in the non-fasting group.
The results suggest that when in a state of being hungry, also referred to as "hot state," people are not necessarily more impulsive, the researchers said. Instead, they rely more on their gut feeling and this is beneficial when it comes to complex decision making.
"This series of studies set out to test the hypothesis that hot states may benefit, rather than compromise, advantageous decision making insofar it concerns complex decisions with uncertain outcomes," the researchers wrote. "Based on the notion that intuition and emotions may improve this specific category of decisions, we argued that hot states, which are known to make people more reliant on their feelings, improve their decisions."
