This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Imagine being hungry in a grocery store and looking for a snack. You have a choice between Gobo granola bars or Kipi granola bars.
Which do you reach for to fill you up? If you're like the participants in our new study, you probably said Gobo. Many factors affect our impressions of foods.
For example, people perceive products with duller packaging to be healthier than those with vivid colors. People also tend to assume that snacks in glossy packaging are higher in fat. In our new study, we looked at how the sound of a snack's name affects these impressions.
In particular, we looked at whether the sound of a snack name can lead people to expect the food to be heavier or lighter and more or less filling. We found that people expected foods with a "large" name like Norgo to be heavier and more filling than foods with a "small" name like Iskee. Our study drew on an effect that is almost 100 years old: the "mil/mal effect".
This is the less well-known sibling of the "bouba/kiki effect"—the tendency to pair some sounds with round shapes and others with spiky shapes. German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler proposed it in the same year, 1929. The mil/mal effect refers to the tendency for people to associate sounds like "ee" or "t" with smaller sizes, and others like "oh" or "b" with larger sizes.
There are many ideas about why this happens. One is that it has to do with the size of your mouth as you pronounce the sounds (try saying "ee" and then "oh," for example). Another is that it comes from the sounds small or big things make in the real world.
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