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Cited by 299

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 69 of the 69 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Breaking Bread: the Functions of Social Eating

Open access
Dunbar, R. I. M.·2017·Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology

Abstract

Communal eating, whether in feasts or everyday meals with family or friends, is a human universal, yet it has attracted surprisingly little evolutionary attention. I use data from a UK national stratified survey to test the hypothesis that eating with others provides both social and individual benefits. I show that those who eat socially more often feel happier and are more satisfied with life, are more trusting of others, are more engaged with their local communities, and have more friends they can depend on for support. Evening meals that result in respondents feeling closer to those with whom they eat involve more people, more laughter and reminiscing, as well as alcohol. A path analysis suggests that the causal direction runs from eating together to bondedness rather than the other way around. I suggest that social eating may have evolved as a mechanism for facilitating social bonding.

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Metadata

Authors
Dunbar, R. I. M.
Venue
Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology
Published
2017-03-11
Volume
3
Issue
3
Pages
198-211
ISSN
2198-7335 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2593385348
Cited by
299
References
69
FWCI
16.31
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Breaking Bread: the Functions of Social Eating. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1007/s40750-017-0061-4
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Dunbar, R. I. M. (2017). Breaking Bread: the Functions of Social Eating. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-017-0061-4

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.