Is Being “Hangry” a Real Emotion?
Is being “hangry” a real, scientifically proven emotion? According to the research of Jennifer K. MacCormack from the University of North Carolina, “found that people describe themselves, when hungry, as more annoyed than usual and less in control of their emotions.” However, through carefully conducted experiments, she debunked the myth of being “hangry” as an emotion. In one experiment, MacCormack discreetly crashed the computers of student participants doing a tedious task. She found that those in the hungry group got annoyed at the computer crashes the same amount as those in the non-hungry control group. Researchers at the University of Oxford also found that hungry students were just as generous towards strangers as sated students. Both researchers found that being hungry isn’t linked to people being more selfish or irritable. The big question now is why do we believe “hangriness” makes us more irritable when we don’t act as such.
The misconception of being hungry can be linked to the wisdom of the crowds and the fragility of truth in information cascades. According to Merriam-Webster, the word “hangry” may have existed as early as the 1950s, but the first written use of it was from a 1992 story in The London Magazine. However, the word didn’t become popularized until the Internet easily spread memes and internet forums. The meaning of the word wove its way into our realities despite the little scientific evidence that being hungry actually made us more irritable and selfish. The adoption of the belief that being hungry made people much more irritable was a result of an information cascade and the false wisdom of the crowds.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/hangry-meaning