Previous studies have found that eating bitter food elicits harsher moral judgments and interpersonal hostility, explain authors Christina Sagioglou and Tobias Greitemeyer, both social psychology professors from Austria’s University of Innsbruck, in their write-up.
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Your taste buds may indicate your personality.
Thankfully, Gizmodo is around to call bullshit on all of this, by pointing out that the taste preferences are coming from what people say they prefer and not from them actually reacting to taste samples.
Do you like your coffee the way you like your bad-luck cats and your cavernous, empty soul?
But other research shows that how a person perceives the taste of bitter foods is based on genetics.
The first experiment involved about 500 people, 35 years old on average, who were asked to rate their food preferences, and complete four personality tests.
The phrase ” Given enough provocation I might hit someone”, was included.
In the second personality test, respondents assessed their personality traits with statements such as “I tend to be callous or insensitive”, or “I tend to want others to pay attention to me”.
How do you take your coffee? They also answered a series of questions relating to the “Big 5” personality traits: openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism.
And while it might be scary in and of itself that there is a need for a test called the “Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies”, the results suggested a link between bitter tastes and a darker mindset.
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‘We found particularly robust correlations with everyday sadism, which is a construct related to benign masochism – the enjoyment of painful activities’. If a study of self-reported data culled from 1,000 participants is any kind of barometer, then liking black coffee, or radishes, or even celery means that you’re probably the next Marquise de Sade.
