How do you get a family to eat something it has always refused?
During the war, the National Research Council had a Committee on Food Habits, and it paid for a field team at the State University of Iowa’s Child Welfare Research Station to study that question. The report, published in 1943 under Kurt Lewin’s name, describes an experiment that picked a hard test on purpose. Kidneys, brains and hearts, it said, met a resistance that was “a rather deep one, frequently combining elements of physical aversion, social status, and superstition.”
The women came from six Red Cross home nursing groups in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 13 to 17 members each. Two groups came from each of three economic levels, one for each method.
Three groups heard a lecture. The nutritionist tied food to the war effort, explained the vitamins and minerals of the three meats with charts, showed how to get around the smell and texture, handed out recipes and told how well the dishes went over with her own family.
The other three groups got the same information in seven to ten minutes, folded into a discussion. A discussion leader asked the women how well a direct appeal would work on housewives like themselves. They talked about why their families turned these meats down, and the expert answered their objections. Then they voted on trying one of the meats the following week. The report stressed that no one was pushed into any kind of “promise.” Each session took about thirty minutes.
Seven days later, interviewers visited each woman at home.
After the lecture, 4 of the 41 women had served at least one of the three meats, 10 percent. After the group decision, 23 of 44 had, 52 percent. Fourteen women in the decision groups had never served any of the three before, and 29 percent of them tried one that week. None of the 11 such women in the lecture groups did.
The report’s explanation was that knowing is not the same as doing. Motivation, it said, “leads to action only if it is brought down from the level of wishes and sentiments to the level of a ‘decision.’”
Some questions stayed open. The check came after one week. The groups were small, and the summary speaks of “about one hundred and twenty women” while the results table counts 85. The decision groups voted and the lecture groups did not.
Four years later, in the first article of the first issue of Human Relations, Lewin cited this report in a paper that also sketched, in a few paragraphs, how a change in a group could be made to last: unfreezing the old level, moving to a new one, and “freezing group life on the new level.”