Structural Balance Theory: Does your Butt Care about your Biceps? [$]

Everything that sucks is good for you. That’s what our intuition tells us. Give someone a piece of food that tastes disgusting and tell them it’s really good for them. They’ll take your word for it. Give someone a piece of this cheesecake and afterwards tell them it’s healthy and they’ll go ”˜Yeah, right’. Even worse, if you tell them beforehand, they’ll enjoy the cheesecake less [1]. We readily believe that stretching is good for us because it hurts and it’s boring, even though stretching often doesn’t help at all. Bodybuilders take this masochistic ”˜no pain no gain’ outlook on life to extremes. Unseasoned chicken with sauceless rice and plain broccoli, anyone? One particular fitness concept that has completely escaped scientific scrutiny because of its inherent plausibility is structural balance theory. To show that nothing escapes the truth, I will hereby shine the light of science on this theory from 7 perspectives.

Read the full article in Alan Aragon’s Research Review of February/March 2014 [$10/issue].