Highlights • • Unauthorized acquisition increased taste pleasantness and enjoyment of identical fries. • • A social-risk gradient emerged: High-Risk > Low-Risk > Gifted > Legitimate. • • Ratings were discrete, with no overlap between Legitimate (5–7) and High-Risk (8–9). • • Context also shifted perceived saltiness, crispiness, and taste intensity. • • Guilt/arousal covaried with unauthorized trials but did not independently predict enjoyment. Abstract Human folklore claims that “stolen food tastes better,” yet its effects on taste have not been quantified. In a within-subject experiment, 120 participants consumed identical French fries under four acquisition contexts: legitimate (own-portion), gifted, low-risk covert taking, and high-risk covert taking. Acquisition context strongly affected both taste pleasantness and overall enjoyment. High-risk covert taking yielded the highest pleasantness ratings, exceeding legitimate consumption by 39.3%. Context also shifted perceived saltiness, crispiness, and intensity. Across covert-taking trials, guilt was positively associated with enjoyment, as was excitement, though neither independently predicted enjoyment once acquisition context was accounted for. Keywords Stolen food ; Forbidden fruit effect ; Guilty pleasure ; Sensory hedonics ; Moral emotion ; Behavioral economics • Previous article (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950329326001096) • Next article (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950329326000972) Introduction The maxim that “stolen food tastes better” resonates cross-culturally, from Italian kitchens (“Il cibo rubato ha più sapore”) to Japanese “nusumigui” (盗み食い, secret eating) and Latin American dichos (“lo prohibido es lo más sabroso”). Yet empirical investigation of this phenomenon remains scarce. While multisensory factors such as auditory context have been shown to modulate perceived texture—demonstrated by Zampini and Spence (2004), who found that the crunchiness of potato chips is influenced by accompanying sounds, and Spence and Wang (2015), who revealed that musical soundtracks can alter wine enjoyment—there has been little attention on how moral transgression itself might enhance gustatory pleasure in everyday settings. A foundational account of why forbidden objects gain value comes from psychological reactance theory, which holds that perceived threats to behavioral freedom amplify desire for the restricted object (Reynolds-Tylus, 2019). Empirical support for this mechanism is well established, from classic demonstrations that restricted options become more attractive (Brehm et al., 1966) to later reviews confirming robust reactance effects across multiple domains (Steindl et al., 2015). Applied to the present context, these accounts predict that the framing of an item as unavailable or forbidden should be sufficient to enhance its perceived quality, independent of any physical change in the stimulus. In the present study, we use the term “stolen food” metaphorically, referring to a structured and ethically approved simulation of unauthorized consumption. Participants were explicitly instructed to take fries from a confederate's portion under controlled conditions. This design was intended to evoke the cognitive-emotional tension of a moral transgression without inducing real harm or legal violation. Thus, “stealing” functions here as an experimentally operationalized symbolic transgression—a benign laboratory analogue of everyday rule-breaking. We acknowledge from the outset that a participant following a researcher's script is technically complying with instructions rather than self-initiating a norm violation; our manipulation is therefore best understood as inducing the cognitive-affective representation of transgression, and we return to this distinction in the Discussion. The “forbidden fruit” effect demonstrates how prohibition amplifies desire through cognitive-emotional pathways (Mann & Ward, 2001). Concurrently, guilt paradoxically enhances hedonic experiences: indulgence paired with mild guilt increases enjoyment more than guilt-free consumption (Goldsmith et al., 2012). Research on flavor perception reveals that flavor arises from the integration of sensory input, contextual cues, and affective states via orbitofrontal-limbic networks (Small et al., 2007). Beyond affective states, context shapes taste through expectation. Piqueras-Fiszman and Spence (2015) reviewed extensive evidence that product-extrinsic cues—including packaging, price, and social framing—systematically alter sensory judgements through top-down expectation mechanisms, independently of any bottom-up change in the stimulus. This suggests a third pathway by which transgressive acquisition might enhance taste: if participants expect stolen food to be more enjoyable (consistent with folk wisdom), those expectations may be self-fulfilling via top-down modulation of orbitofrontal processing. Distinguishing expectation-driven from arousal-driven enhancement is a key interpretive challenge for the present design. However, internally generated moral emotions (e.g., theft-induced guilt) remain unexplored drivers of taste perception. Our study sought to fill this gap by operationalizing “stolen taste” through a controlled within-subjects design: participants consumed identical portions of French fries under four acquisition conditions (legitimate ownership, low-risk theft from a friendly confederate, high-risk theft from a stern confederate, and socially sanctioned gifting). Guided by the three theoretical pathways outlined above—psychological reactance, arousal mis-attribution, and expectation-driven top-down modulation—we pre-specified the following hypotheses. First, drawing on reactance theory and the forbidden-fruit literature, we predicted that covertly obtained fries would receive higher taste pleasantness and enjoyment ratings than legitimately consumed or gifted fries (H1: transgression main effect). Second, we predicted a social-risk gradient within theft conditions: high-risk covert taking (stern confederate) would produce higher hedonic ratings than low-risk covert taking (friendly confederate), because greater perceived social threat amplifies both reactance and arousal (H2: risk gradient). Third, based on the arousal mis-attribution account and Goldsmith et al.'s (2012) guilt-pleasure findings, we predicted that self-reported guilt and excitement would be positively associated with enjoyment ratings across unauthorized trials (H3: emotional mediation). Fourth, the gifted condition was included as a social control to isolate the specific contribution of transgression over and above positive social interaction: if reactance rather than social warmth drives the effect, gifted fries should be rated lower than stolen fries despite equally positive social contact (H4: social control contrast). By directly comparing moral-emotional and sensory hedonic outcomes, this investigation bridges anecdotal folk wisdom with rigorous psychophysiology and social cognition. It extends our understanding of how everyday transgressions engage reward circuits, offering insights with implications for impulsive behavior, consumer psychology, neurobiology of reward, and the emerging field of affective gastronomy. Section snippets Participants One hundred twenty healthy adult volunteers (aged 18–50 years, mean age=33.4 years; 70 females, 50 males) were recruited through university participant pools and community advertisements. Exclusion criteria comprised self-reported food allergies (specifically to potatoes or cooking oils), current diagnosis of an eating disorder, significant gastrointestinal conditions, or use of medications known to alter taste perception or appetite. All participants provided written informed consent prior Participants and data completeness All 120 enrolled participants completed the four experimental conditions, yielding 480 analyzable observations. No data exclusions were necessary, with complete datasets for all primary measures. Descriptive statistics for hedonic and sensory outcomes across all four conditions are shown in Table 1A, and affective/moral ratings in the unauthorized conditions are summarized in Table 1B; raw data are provided in Supplementary Table S1. To test sensory-specific satiety/sequence effects, we Discussion This study provides robust empirical validation for the folk adage that “stolen food tastes better,” demonstrating that unauthorized acquisition of French fries amplifies hedonic perception in quantifiable and psychologically nuanced ways. We chose fries due to their ease of standardization and rapid preparation; future work could test foods more commonly associated with opportunistic theft (e.g., cheese, widely reported as the world's most-stolen food) to examine whether the stolen-food effect Conclusion This investigation empirically substantiates the folk intuition that stolen food carries heightened hedonic value, demonstrating that unauthorized acquisition of French fries amplifies taste perception through identifiable psychoaffective mechanisms. Our data reveal a social risk gradient: fries taken covertly from stern confederates were rated markedly superior to those obtained legitimately or through generosity, with guilt and self-reported arousal covarying with unauthorized consumption, CRediT authorship contribution statement • *Valentin Skryabin:** Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Ethical statement This study was approved by the Moscow Independent Ethics Committee. All participants provided written informed consent prior to enrollment. The protocol incorporated deception (e.g., confederates pretending not to notice fry theft), which was fully disclosed during post-study debriefing. Participants retained the right to withdraw data, though none exercised this option. All procedures adhered to the Declaration of Helsinki. Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. 1 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950329326001126#bfn0005) ORCID ID: 0000–0002–4942-8556. View full text (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950329326001126)