A report called The Development of the Attitudes to Chocolate Questionnaire, published in 1998, tells how three researchers at the University of Wales, Swansea, cooked up a new analytic tool.
Psychologists had long craved a way to assess someone’s craving for chocolate. Why chocolate? Because “chocolate is by far the most commonly craved food”. It tempts chocoholics, and also academics who hunger for knowledge and perhaps recognition.
The desired goal – the perhaps impossible dream – is to measure and compare any two people’s chocolate cravings as reliably as one can measure and compare the heights of two tables. But cravings are often intertwined with emotions, and table heights are not. This explains why table heights are easier to measure….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.