Mallow Fries


French fries? No, this is candy! The fries are made of marshmallow, and the “ketchup” is strawberry sauce. I don’t think I could handle the cognitive dissonance of trying them out. Link -via Unique Daily

Last Halloween my fiance and I went as the Burger King and Dairy Queen. He had the creepy King costume, and for an added touch I purchased marshmallow ice cream sundaes, hamburgers, and fries for us to carry around with us at a party. The fries were this exact brand and sadly, they didn't taste very good at all. The horrified look on my fiance's face when he bit into one was well worth the money I spent on the prop candy.
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Haha, cognitive dissonance. Not quite appropriate for this post. That would imply that as a consequence of eating these "mallow fries" of your own free will - which you appear to find unappealing, you would experience conflict, and the way you would resolve that conflict would be to convince yourself that you actually wanted to eat them and in fact enjoy the taste.
However if there were some sort of external motivation (e.g. somebody paid you to eat them), you wouldn't experience that conflict and would still find them disgusting.
But I get what you were getting at - there's nothing worse than for example, when you take a swig of what you thought would be water when it's in fact milk. Milk isn't gross on its own (neither are marshmellows), but when you expected to taste something else then it totally is!
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Wikipedia: Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state that describes the uncomfortable feeling when a person begins to understand that something the person believes to be true is, in fact, not true.

This comes from believing that something that looks like this will taste salty when you put it in your mouth, based on years of seeing something that looks like "this." Yet, it in fact tastes sweet. That would make me uncomfortable.
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That definition of cognitive dissonance is not entirely accurate (I think we all know the limitations of info from Wiki). A more accurate definition would be the feeling of discomfort we experience when there are inconsistencies between our attitudes and behaviour. But according to Festinger's (who also coined the term) theory of cognitive dissonance, that feeling of conflict is a motivational state which causes us to try to resolve it. Research shows that the most common way that people resolve this conflict is by changing our attutudes to make them consistant with this unlikely behaviour. For example;

Unlikely behaviour: eating something we think looks disgusting in the absence of any external motivation (e.g. being paid or dared to eat it).
Conflict: "Why the hell would I eat something that's so obviously disgusting. What was I thinking? I wouldn't normally do this."
Change of attitude to resolve conflict: "Perhaps it's not so bad after all."

Of course if you didn't know in advance that these "Fries" would actually be made of marshmellows (what we call them in Australia), and upon tasting them they were unexpectedly sweet, that would be a shock, and probably cause you to be disgusted, but "cognitive dissonance" is not an entirely accurate way to describe that experience. It would be more of an inconsistency between visual and taste/olfactory stimuli.
I'm not trying to correct you to be a snob. I just think it's a fascinating theory that can be applied to so many aspects of our lives and that can explain a lot.
Read the rest of the Wiki page for more information or further research it. I think you'll find the theory fascinating. I remember there was an post on Neatorama a while ago about it too - something about tribes and their unlikely ideas about what is attractive.
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I am aware how Australians spell "Arse". Who cares how you spell a slang word? Personally I both pronounce and spell arse as "ass". It's not like I'm ever going to use the word in any official context so what does it matter? Clearly I have some knowledge of spelling and grammar and you choose to completely discount whatever I say because I choose to spell ass the way I want.
There's no need to critisise me just because you don't like psychologists (yes, I remember you).
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