Being 'hangry' makes you crave junk food, but surprisingly, it doesn't make you any less patient with your money or your friends.
Popular psychology suggests that hunger depletes 'willpower' across the board, making us more impulsive in all areas of life. This eye-tracking study found the effect is actually hyper-specific: hunger changes how you look at and choose food, but your financial decision-making and social preferences remain completely unchanged.
Domain-Specific Effects of Hunger on Attention and Choice
PsyArXiv · kwnma_v2
Hunger leads to less healthy decision-making, but its effect on decision-making in non-food domains is less clear. To close this gap, we investigated to what extent hunger state affected choice across domains by examining attentional patterns and cognitive mechanisms underlying decision-making across different domains. We implemented a within-subject design in which participants completed a food choice, an intertemporal discounting, and a social preferences task in hungry and sated states while