EXPRESS: Healthy Relationships and Healthy Eating: How Stressful Events and Social Support Affect Indulgence

Abstract

We investigate how acute stress and social support jointly influence indulgent food decision making using lab experiments and a unique combination of large-scale datasets. Our experiments reveal that social support moderates the effect of stress on indulgent food choices, with individuals with lower support more likely to indulge under stress. We argue that this occurs because social support provides psychological resources that help individuals regulate their behavior under stress. Using a process-by-moderation approach, we demonstrate that providing contextual support, enhancing perceived control, and promoting deliberative thinking attenuate the effect of low social support on indulgent behavior under stress. At a broader level, we test these predictions by analyzing the impact of Hurricane Sandy, an exogenous stressor, on indulgent food purchases. A Difference-in-Difference (DiD) analysis in a natural experiment reveals that while Sandy-affected areas experienced a significant rise in indulgent food sales, this increase was attenuated in communities with higher social support, suggesting that the availability of social resources plays a critical role in moderating stress-driven consumption. Together, our research highlights how social support shapes stress-induced consumption patterns and identifies novel factors that affect indulgent food choices on a real-world and large-scale basis.