Abstract

South Korea has one of the lowest rates of shared meals across the world. This prevalence of solitary meals (commonly known as “honbap”) seems to stem from a popular belief that eating alone is more liberating, comfortable, and less emotionally draining than eating with others. The present research investigated if there is any empirical truth to this belief. We analyzed the day reconstruction method data from the “2023 Koreans’ Happiness Survey” conducted by the National Assembly Futures Institute. Participants recalled the most important activity they engaged in during a randomly assigned time block (e.g., 3 to 6 PM) the previous day. Among the 3,073 participants who selected “Eating Meals or Snacks” for this activity, those who ate alone reported lower life satisfaction than those who ate with others. More importantly, the very experience of eating alone was also associated with lower levels of positive affect (e.g., “comfortable”) and higher levels of negative affect (e.g., “tense/stressful”) than eating with others. Additional analyses revealed that the affective well-being during yesterday’s meal was the lowest when alone, compared to eating with spouse, family (excluding spouse), friends, or others (e.g., coworkers). The negative link between solitary meal and affective well-being remained robust even after controlling for several demographic and social psychological variables (e.g., baseline life satisfaction, marital status, extraversion, income). A key limitation of the present research is that it cannot rule out the possibilities that the reported experiences were emotionally salient ones and thus non-representative of everyday meals, and that the shared meal experiences predominantly involved close others, or at least neutral companions. These findings suggest that the public perception of honbap as liberating may not be supported by empirical data, and highlight the affective value of shared meals.