14 DAY TRIAL // It might be best if crooks were left in the dark about this piece of news, but it looks like scrambled eggs and chocolate make people more trusting and therefore more willing to share their money with others.
According to a group of Dutch scientists, said foods are likely to promote feelings of trust due to the fact that they contain a chemical compound known as tryptophan.
Daily Mail tells us that, in order to study how this compound influences behavior, researchers asked several volunteers to drink some orange juice, and then take part in a game of trust.
As part of this game, they were supposed to give others a sum of money of their choice and trust that, once their partner tripled the sum, they would give them their money back, plus something extra for the trouble.
By the looks of it, the people whose orange juice had been "spiked" with tryptophan gave their game partners about 40% more money than the ones who were not exposed to this compound did.
"We found that people who took tryptophan transferred significantly more euros than people who took the placebo. Our results support the materialist approach that you are what you eat, the idea that the food one eats has a bearing on one’s state of mind."
"So the food we take may act as a cognitive enhancer that modulates the way we think and perceive the physical and social world. In particular, the supplementation of tryptophan or diets containing tryptophan may promote interpersonal trust in inexpensive, efficient and healthy ways," the Leiden University researchers summed up their findings.
Tryptophan is also found in red meat, cottage cheese, spinach, bananas, tuna and turkey, so it looks like those who want to make others trust them (hopefully not for the wrong reasons) need only figure out which of these foods their “victim” would be utterly unable to pass up on.