Stereotypes: Women and chocolate, is the stereotype true?

At an icecream dinner party the question came up whether women actually like chocolate more than men. Stereotypes are known to often be correct, so i was curius. Quoting from Pinker's The Blank Slate:

The idea that stereotypes are inherently irrational owes more to a condescension toward ordinary people than it does to good psychological research. Many researchers, having shown that stereotypes existed in the minds of their subjects, assumed that the stereotypes had to be irrational, because they were uncomfortable with the possibility that some trait might be statistically true of some group. They never actually checked. That began to change in the 1980s, and now a fair amount is known about the accuracy of stereotypes.14

With some important exceptions, stereotypes are in fact  not  inaccurate when assessed against objective benchmarks such as census figures or the reports of the stereotyped people themselves. People who believe that African Americans are more likely to be on welfare than whites, that Jews have higher average incomes than WASPs, that business students are more conservative than students in the arts, that women are more likely than men to want to lose weight, and that men are more likely than women to swat a fly with their bare hands, are not being irrational or bigoted. Those beliefs are correct. People's stereotypes are generally consistent with the statistics, and in many cases their bias is to underestimate the real differences between sexes or ethnic groups.15 This does not mean that the stereotyped traits are unchangeable, of course, or that people think they are unchangeable, only that people perceive the traits fairly accurately at the time.

Moreover, even when people believe that ethnic groups have characteristic  traits, they are never mindless stereotypers who literally believe that each and every member of the group possesses those traits. People may think that Germans are, on average, more efficient than non-Germans, but no one believes that every last German is more efficient than every non-German.16 And people have no trouble overriding a stereotype when they have good information about an individual. Contrary to a common accusation, teachers‘ impressions of their individual pupils are not contaminated by their stereotypes of race, gender, or socioeconomic status. The teachers‘ impressions accurately reflect the pupil's performance as measured by objective tests.17

Now for the important exceptions. Stereotypes can be downright inaccurate when a person has few or no firsthand encounters with the stereotyped   {205}  group, or belongs to a group that is overtly hostile to the one being judged. During World War II, when the Russians were allies of the United States and the Germans were enemies, Americans judged Russians to have more positive traits than Germans. Soon afterward, when the alliances reversed, Americans judged Germans to have more positive traits than Russians.18

Also, people's ability to set aside stereotypes when judging  an individual is accomplished by their conscious, deliberate reasoning. When people are distracted or put under pressure to respond quickly, they are more likely to judge that a member of an ethnic group has all the stereotyped traits of the group.19  This comes from the two-part design of the human categorization system mentioned earlier. Our network of fuzzy associations naturally reverts to a stereotype when we  first encounter an individual. But our rule-based categorizer can block out those associations and make deductions based on the relevant facts about that individual. It can do so either for practical reasons, when information about a group-wide average is  less diagnostic than information about the individual, or for social and moral reasons, out of respect for the imperative that one  ought  to ignore certain group-wide averages when judging an individual.

The upshot of this research is not that stereotypes  are always accurate but that they are not always false, or even usually false. This is just what we would expect if human categorization — like the rest of the mind —  is an adaptation that keeps track of aspects of the world that are relevant to our long-term well-being. As the social psychologist Roger Brown pointed out, the main difference between categories of people and categories of other things is that when you use a prototypical exemplar to stand for a category of things, no one takes offense. When Webster's dictionary used a sparrow to stand for all birds, ―emus and ostriches and penguins and eagles did not go on the attack.‖ But just imagine what would have happened if Webster's had used a picture of a soccer mom to illustrate woman and a picture of a business executive to illustrate man. Brown remarks, ―Of course, people would be right to take offense since a prototype can never represent the variation that exists in natural categories. It's just that birds don't care but people do." 20

What are the implications of the fact that many stereotypes are statistically accurate? One is that contemporary scientific research on sex differences cannot be dismissed just because some of the findings are consistent with traditional stereotypes of men and women. Some parts of those stereotypes may be false, but the mere fact that they are stereotypes does not prove that they are false in every respect.

and so on. What about women and chocolate? Chocolate craving and liking

Abstract.

Liking  and  craving  for  chocolate  and  related  substances  were  surveyed  in  a sample  of  University  of Pennsylvania  undergraduates  (n = 249)  and  their  parents (n=  319).  Chocolate  was  highly  liked  in  all  groups,  with  a  stronger  liking  by females.  Chocolate  is  the  most  craved  food  among  females,  and  is  craved  by almost  half  of  the  female  sample  (in  both  age  groups).  Although  this  craving  is related  to  a  sweet  craving,  it  cannot  be  accounted  for  as  a  craving  for  sweets. About  half  of  the  female  cravers  show  a  very  well  defined  craving  peak  for chocolate  in  the  perimenstrual  period,  beginning  from  a  few days  before  the  onset of  menses  and  extending  into  the  first  few  days  of  menses.  There  is  not  a significant  relation  in  chocolate  craving  or  liking  between  parents  and  their children.  The  current  motivation  for  chocolate  preference  seems  to  be  primarily, if not  entirely,  sensory.  Liking  for  chocolate  correlates  significantly  with  liking  for sweets  and  white  chocolate.  The  liking  for  the  sensory  properties  could  originate in  innate  or  acquired  liking  based  on  the  sweetness,  texture  and  aroma  of chocolate,  or  it  could  be based  in  part  on  interactions  between  the  postingestional effects  of  chocolate  and  a  person’s  state  (e.g.,  mood,  hormone  levels).  Based  on correlational  data,  we  find  little  evidence  for  a  relation  between  addiction  to chocolate  or  the  pharmacological  (e.g.,  xanthine-based)  effects  of  chocolate  and the  liking  for  chocolate.

Below are most of the result tables from the study.

So, 1) the difference is real, 2) it is somewhat due to the menstruation cyclus, but apparently not entirely. Sweets , chocolate , and atypical depressive traits fixd

Abstract.

An original questionnaire, the Foods and Moods Inventory (FMI) was used to investigate appetite for sweets and chocolate and its relationship to dysphoric mood. The FMI was administered to a group of subjects with an identified interest in chocolate (chocolate group, N = 73), a comparison sample (comparison group,  N = 172), and a sample of former alcoholics (iV = 22). Those who reported “self-medicating” with sweets or chocolate were more likely to have personality traits associated with hysteroid dysphoria, an atypical depressive syndrome. In addition, the tendency to eat compulsively, in general, and appetite for sweets and chocolate, in particular, were significantly greater among women.

From the study:

Gender and Appetite for Sweets/Chocolate A relationship between gender and craving for sweets and/or chocolate was shown in the finding that 92% of the self-medicators were women. Although 65.2% of the entire sample were women, this was still a highly significant gender-related difference (x2 = 17.5,  df = 1,  p < .0001). Moreover, in all subjects combined, women were found to have significantly higher scores than men on the Sweets, Chocolate, and Eating Scales as well as marginally higher scores on the Hys Dys Scale (Table 3). Using analyses of variance to further explore the relationship between gender, group, and the four FMI scales, a significant main effect for gender was con­ firmed for the Sweets, Chocolate, and Eating Scales but not the Hys Dys Scale. In this analysis, the main effect for gender on Hys Dys fell below the level of statistical significance and a significant group by gen­ der interaction emerged, with women higher on Hys Dys in the comparison and alcoholic groups but  not in the chocolate group. Although it is difficult to interpret this interaction, it would appear in any case that the higher Hys Dys scores of self-medicators probably cannot be attributed to the disproportionate number of women in this group. Indeed, an analysis among women alone confirmed that self-medicators had higher scores on Hys Dys as well as on the other FMI scales.

--- It seems that the answer to the question posed in the title is: Yes, women like chocolate more than men. The reasons being somewhat more speculative, but perhaps having to do with hormone levels in the menstruation cyclus.