Food Preference and Personality

While reading the unit's material on food, I wondered how much of one’s personality (if any at all) could be predicted by their food preferences. A fascinating article by Karen Wu presents nine tersely stated correlations between food preferences and personality, along with the studies that back them up. I found the facts interesting, and I recommend reading the article (as stated in my references and hyperlinked here) for the information and studies on each of the nine connections just because they are interesting. 

However, I would like to share my thoughts on the first fact in the article. Wu states that “If you like bitter food, you may be a bitter person. In other words, you may have greater levels of antisocial or psychopathic traits” (Wu, 2023). She then details the findings from a study in which researchers surveyed 953 Americans about their personality and food preferences; the study showed that “preferences for bitter food predicted antisocial traits, specifically psychopathy, aggression, and especially everyday sadism, or experiencing pleasure from other people’s pain in everyday life” (Wu, 2023).

The findings made me consider innate preferences and the biological instincts associated with the food we eat. The generalized fact that “If you like bitter food, you may be a bitter person” makes sense to me, considering that in this course we learned about how even at a young age, humans tend to “prefer sweets and shun bitter stimuli” (Berg, 2025). In other words, the preference for bitter food goes against biological instincts, which makes it very plausible that those who willingly eat bitter foods are “bitter” themselves.

References

Berg, M. (2025). Motivation PSYC 3380's "Food" Slideshow.

Wu, K. (2023, January 8). 9 Things That Your Food Might Say About Your Personality. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-heart/202301/9-things-that-your-food-might-say-about-your-personality