As Shankar Vedantam breathlessly put it during a recent NPR interview with Keltner:
It’s easy to appreciate the appeal of this study–it neatly encapsulates and supports our worry that power changes us, shaping us into less moral and sensitive creatures.
Finally, one of the authors of the study, Dacher Keltner, has written and discussed the study extensively, penning both thought-provoking essays and a pop-science book which feature the Cookie-Monster Study prominently. It’s been lifted up into life advice, via a commencement address that went viral by Moneyball author Michael Lewis (“ Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie“, delivered at Princeton in 2012). There’s a cute YouTube video explaining the study which has been viewed over 100,000 times. It has been covered extensively in the national news media for over a decade ( here and here and here and here and of course by NPR here and here and here…and, well, lots more places). This study has become influential in the public sphere. (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003) (p. Male participants ate in more disinhibited ways as well, lending further support to our power-based hypothesis, to the extent that gender is equated with power. Coding of the videotaped interactions also revealed that high-power individuals were more likely to chew with their mouths open and to get crumbs on their faces and on the table. Consistent with the prediction, high-power individuals were more likely to take a second cookie (see Figure 6). This procedure allowed each participant to take one cookie and provided an opportunity for at least 1 participant to comfortably take a second cookie, thus leaving one cookie on the plate. After group members discussed a long and rather tedious list of social issues for 30 min, the experimenter arrived with a plate of five cookies.
In same-sex groups of 3 individuals, 1 randomly chosen individual (the high-power person) was given the role of assigning experi- mental points to the other 2 on the basis of their contributions to written policy recommendations concerning contentious social is- sues. Ward and Keltner (1998) examined whether power would produce socially inappropriate styles of eating. If you don’t already know it, here’s a quick summary: In psychology, there are a few studies so famous and influential that they have proper names: The Good Samaritan Study, the Asch Obedience Study, the Marshmallow test, etc, etc.Īpproaching this echelon is the “Cookie Monster Study”, an increasingly-famous study of social power.
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