Love your Coffee black and tight might betray the dark side of you. Psychologists from the University of Innsbruck (Austria) have indeed shown the existence of a link between the preference for bitter taste and antisocial personality traits, in a study published in the scientific journal Appetite.
Selfishness, vanity and sadism
The researchers carried out two successive experiments bringing together a total of nearly 1,000 people. First, participants were asked to indicate their taste preferences for drinks and bitter foods, compared to sugary, salty and sour foods. Then, in a second step, the psychologists carried out a series of personality tests aimed at evaluating Machiavellianism, psychopathy, the narcissism, the sadism and aggressiveness. The results obtained show that there is a correlation between the preference for bitter taste and asocial personalities: “the results suggest that the preference for bitter foods and drinks is closely related to the blackness of the personality“explain the psychologists in their study. Thus, people preferring bitter foods and drinks would more often show selfishness, vanity, and would even take pleasure in seeing others suffer.
Risk appetite ?
The taste for bitterness does not seem to have a biological explanation. Indeed, according to the study’s authors, “survival depends on the consumption of sugary substances and the rejection of bitter substances, as sugary foods typically have a high caloric density while bitterness often indicates the presence of toxinsAppreciating these “dangerous” foods might then reflect a taste for risk, which also translates into a darker personality and strong character traits.
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