We all know that college students drink and party, but what is your drink of choice? If you are anything like me, you enjoy a good beer, which according to recent studies may mean that you are a psychopath. Or at least it may mean you are prone to have a more hostile personality.
Humans have a unique liking towards bitter foods where as to animals bitter foods are usually a warning sign that tells them the food is inedible. Is this why scientists seem to think human’s tastes are associated with their personality?
“Individual differences in bitter taste preferences are associated with antisocial personality traits” conducted by Sagioglou C. & Greitemeyer T, suggests that people with the greatest liking to bitterness tend to exhibit more psychopathic and antisocial tendencies.
Within this study 500 participants were asked to give their preference of food items within the bounds of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter foods and then a list was generated using those foods and each participant was asked to rate how much they enjoyed the item on a scale of 1 to 6.
Coffee, Beer and dark chocolate were examples of bitter food given by the participants, candy, chocolate cake and strawberry ice cream represent sweet, Lemons and vinegar were among the sour foods, and beef jerky and bacon were listed within the salty foods section.
Then, the participants were asked to take a series of personality assessment quizzes which would evaluate their levels of narcissism,tendencies toward psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (also known at the Dark Triad traits), their levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness (Big Five personality traits), aggression, and everyday sadism.
“Researchers found that people who liked bitter foods were also more likely to score highly in measures of psychopathy, sadism, and aggression. The liking of bitter foods was a better predictor of personality than any of the other tastes. The study authors say “Taken together, the results suggest that how much people like bitter-tasting foods and drinks is stably tied to how dark their personality is,” states Alexandra Ossola of popsci.com
“General bitter taste preferences were positively associated with psychopathy, everyday sadism, trait aggression, and negatively associated with agreeableness. Moreover, bitter taste preferences were significantly correlated with sour preferences, which just like the bitter taste preferences were significantly positively correlated with trait aggression and everyday sadism.” (x)
While those who tended to love sweets and sugary foods scored higher within “agreeableness”.
Think to yourself if you were to be asked right now do you prefer your coffee black or sweetened? Do you think this says something about your personality or are these researchers taking a shot in the dark? What about those everyday sadists, do they like black coffee?
I don’t know about you but a part of me thinks that my love of dark chocolate, coffee and beer is hinting to the facts that science are trying to connect and this isn’t just a blind shot.
References
Love Beer and Coffee? You might be a psychopath
Individual differences in bitter taste preferences are associated with antisocial personality traits
If you drink Black coffee experts say you might be a psychopath
Biochemstudentblog 