If You Like Black Coffee, You’re More Likely To Be A Psychopath, Says Researchers

Darker Tastes

If you're someone who loves a black coffee in the morning, who prefers dark chocolate over milk, or asks for a gin and tonic on a night out over a margarita, your mind may be a bit darker than most. In fact, you very well might be a psychopath.

A study investigating the connection between someone's taste preferences and their proclivity for 'antisocial' personality traits has revealed that, yes, people who like bitter foods are more likely to have psychopathic tendencies.

Surprising Results

The study came from researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, where they looked at the taste preferences of 953 Americans. Participants were asked how much they liked different taste profiles, namely sweet, sour, and bitter ones. They were then asked to complete four different personality surveys that assessed them for traits like narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism, and, yes, psychopathy.

"The results of both studies confirmed the hypothesis that bitter taste preferences are positively associated with malevolent personality traits, with the most robust relation to everyday sadism and psychopathy."

Bitter Scaling

Not only that, but bitter tastes also signified a decrease in more positive traits. As written in the study, "everyday sadism and trait aggression were significantly positively correlated, and agreeableness was significantly negatively correlated with general bitter taste preferences."

This means that your level of enjoyment also correlates with the intensity or severity of those traits. If you really, really like bitter food, these traits not only appear more, but they appear more aggressively compared to someone who only mildly enjoys that taste. The darker your taste, the darker your personality.

Nothing Is Certain

The team did warn that this finding shouldn't be used to make snap judgments about people. For something as complex as psychopathy, there will never be a one-hundred percent accurate way to tell if someone has that or any other 'antisocial' personality trait. They remind readers that studies of this nature are still new, and though there does appear to be a connection, "evidence is still scarce."

Remember, this study isn't saying that a preference for bitterness makes someone a psychopath but rather that people who display psychopathy are more likely to enjoy bitterness. It's correlation, not causation.

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Opposite Ends

While there isn't another study that backs this one up yet, there is another, more recent study that showed the opposite. This one from Medical School Berlin, they discovered that "sweet taste was associated with an increase in prosocial behavior [...]." This was less of an overall personality profile and more of a moment-to-moment result, but it's still fascinating that sweetness and bitterness seem so tied to opposite ends of the emotional spectrum.

In either case, I wouldn't actually worry about what your taste preferences say about your proclivity for anything good or bad. Enjoying the food you like is far more important than trying to determine what they say about you as a person.

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