Death reminders drive women to restrict their food intake in pursuit of thinness

Evidence

As it turned out, the men and women who thought about pain ate the same amount from the 10-gram snack bowls, but after thinking about death, the women ate about 40 percent less. And the death-primed men? They ate as much as their pain-primed counterparts. Death thoughts apparently drove women to seek to meet the cultural ideal of thinness. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 713

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the earlier chapters’ framework on distal defenses against terror management — eating restraint as a culturally-constructed buffer specific to women.
• SHARE: A precise empirical gender asymmetry — death-primed men eat normally, women eat 40% less — worth sending to anyone in social psychology or eating-disorder research.