Do Dinner Companions Affect Your Diet?

The following comes from SparkPeople:

Does the sex or the number of your dinner companions influence how much you eat? New research shows that depending on who they are eating with, females eat differently.

A new study in the journal Appetite observed college men and women eating in the school cafeteria. Men did not appear to be influenced by outside sources, including how many people they ate with or whether their companions were male or female. But according to the study, women were a different story. When a woman ate with a man, they ate less than they did when eating with another woman.

When women ate with a mixed group, they tended to eat less than they did in a group of all women. As soon as a man entered the equation, they ate less. When women ate with a group of all women, the bigger the group, the more they tended to eat. Why the difference? Are they eating less with men to impress? Do they even notice these factors are affecting their dining habits?