Sharing is not always caring: How sharing labels encourage personal consumption as a response to the threat of others

In recent years, some of the world's largest food manufacturers have begun labelling multi-portion packages as meant for sharing with the expressed objective of encouraging more mindful food intake. Yet, despite the overwhelming adoption of this strategy in the marketplace, scientific literature remains scarce as to whether sharing labels can indeed achieve their intended objective. The current work fills this gap in the literature by demonstrating that sharing labels may ironically backfire as a self-regulation tool. Specifically, four studies show that sharing labels generate a self-interested urgency for consuming one's own portion of a resource before it is depleted by others, resulting in an increase (rather than a decrease) in personal food intake.