Avis de soutenance - doctorat - Adoración GUZMÁN GARCíA

Food choices among young adults are shaped by multiple factors, including taste, health, availability, price, and social context. Yet this period of life is also one in which social norms, identity concerns, and gender expectations are especially salient. In many Western contexts, meat is associated with masculinity, whereas vegetables and lighter foods are associated with femininity. These associations influence individuals' food preferences in ways that may have implications for health and sustainability. Even though the origins of these associations are largely social and cultural, many young people believe that men should indeed eat more meat than women, often by appealing to natural and inherent underlying reasons. This dissertation examines how gendered food norms acquire prescriptive force, focusing on the interaction between linguistic framing and cognitive heuristics. It considers three forms of language (i.e. generic statements, quantified statements, and comparative statements) and the inherence heuristic, a cognitive tendency to explain observed patterns by appealing to inherent features of the entities involved (e.g. "men just don't like vegetables") rather than to external or contextual factors (e.g. the influence of marketing). Across empirical studies, this thesis develops and tests a novel paradigm and finds that inherent explanations play a central role in the endorsement of food stereotypes. When participants explain associations between men and meat, or between women and vegetables, by appealing to internal characteristics of the gender group, they are more likely to endorse the association and to resist the idea that the opposite gender should consume the same food. By contrast, extrinsic explanations, such as personal taste, socialization, or contextual factors, are associated with more flexible judgments. The studies also show that linguistic framing shapes how gendered food associations are interpreted. Generic statements tend to increase endorsement of gender stereotypes compared with quantified and comparative statements, but different linguistic forms also guide attention toward different kinds of explanations. Generic language appears to promote broader kind-based reasoning, sometimes leading participants to justify associations through health-based explanations about humans in general. Comparative statements, by contrast, make gender contrast more salient and may elicit explanations focused more directly on differences between men and women. Thus, linguistic framing shapes how these associations are explained and the extent to which they are endorsed. Finally, the intervention studies examine whether targeting inherent explanations can reduce endorsement of gendered food norms. Across online and field interventions, the results suggest that reading brief essays providing external explanations for the regularity that men eat more meat than women (e.g. meat as a marker of social status or the influence of marketing) can reduce reliance on inherent reasoning and, in some contexts, weaken endorsement of the meat–masculinity association. Although effects on attitudes, motivation, and behavior are more limited, these findings indicate that challenging inherent explanations is a promising avenue for promoting more flexible food-related identities and for informing public health interventions aimed at healthier and more sustainable diets. Together, these findings suggest that gendered food norms are maintained not only by repeated exposure to gendered patterns of consumption, but also by the ways in which these patterns are linguistically framed and explained. By identifying the linguistic and cognitive processes that contribute to the endorsement of gendered food norms, this work advances our understanding of gendered food choices as a social and psychological phenomenon and offers new perspectives for interventions aimed at reducing gendered barriers to healthier and more sustainable dietary change.