Why guys gives us chocolate? (Part 1)

The second most difficult question ever asked by women is "Why guys gives us chocolate?" (the first, of course, being "Is chocolate the answer to all our problems?"). I will begin to attempt to answer this question by introducing the Stroop effect. You might not see a link right away, but I like my discussions to be eclectic :)

You have all probably seen and did the Stroop task before. In the first part, the participant has to name the color of different stimuli (such as colored shapes or objects). The purpose is to measure the reaction times of the person to say the color out loud. Of course, we consider also the errors in naming the proper color. Then, in another set of stimuli, the participant is presented with words representing colors and having different colors than their meaning such as those below.

Here is where we observe the Stroop effect. We notice a difference in the reaction times of this second set of stimuli since there are conflicting processes occurring at the same time. Also, more errors can occur depending on the process that takes over. This effect has been replicated more than 700 times[1] and anyone can do it and see the increase in difficulty of the task in the second set.

Thus, if we replace the shapes of the first set by some Chinese symbols, we expect to see longer reaction times for Chinese speaking people than those who do not understand the symbols.

[Translation: black, yellow, orange, red, blue, green, pink, purple, white]

By manipulating this effect, researchers found many interesting results. What I would like to discuss here is the concept of self-control. To do this task, one needs self-control in order to ignore the meaning of the words and say the color of the word. The research published in 2007 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Gailliot et al. on the matter of control using this effect and other tasks is one of many. I will not get in the details of each study per se, but the conclusion is after performing such a task, our glucose depletes and the subsequent tasks of self-control show worse performance than the first. This inference sounds obvious, since as in physical tasks, mental control needs energy (i.e. glucose). Now begins a discussion that is somehow far fetched but nevertheless interesting…

The fact that we need glucose (i.e. sugar) in order to control ourselves in complex tasks or just to resist temptation got me wondering about why guys give us girls chocolates, candies and other sugary coated/filled/tasting foods. There are three possibilities according to me…

The first being that they’re just trying to buy us, which might work in some cases or…okay… in most cases.

The next being that they count on the “effects” of chocolate and sugar to give us a high that conditions us to associate this high with the person giving us the chocolates. [Some other time, I will bring up the subject of the effects of chocolate on the mind and body. To give you a heads-up, chocolate dilates the blood vessels and razes heart rates to some extent ;)]

The third possibility is, of course, that guys basically have no idea that we use those huge amounts of sugar in chocolate to basically resist…them! In that matter, from the start we have only enough energy to resist the chocolates and eating those is mandatory in order to resist their owners. When we finally depleted all the chocolates in the box and the sugar in our body, resistance is futile…

BEWARE!: This last exploratory discussion is oversimplifying research data and it is the result of merely my attempt at humor.
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For a short summary of the Stroop effect, check:
[1] Stroop effect. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved January 11, 2009, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/stroop-effect

For the full article, please visit: http://www.uky.edu/~njdewa2/gailliotetal07JPSP.pdf