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
This is interesting, I never realized that food preferences could be linked to personality traits. The idea that if someone who enjoys better foods goes against the biological instinct to prefer sweet food makes sense especially in childhood that it could reflect a developing personality. It also makes me wonder about the role of prenatal exposure to certain flavors. The slides discuss how if a mother drinks carrot juice while pregnant, the baby might develop a preference for carrot-flavored foods. So how much of a person’s taste for bitter food is really about personality and how much is what they were exposed to in the womb? Maybe, the flavors we are exposed to as a child play a role in shaping our food preferences and traits, or maybe its genetics or environmental factors that influence. For example, even if something like the taste of tap water can vary, like in New Jersey it tastes different than in another state. I also wonder if the connection between food preferences and personality might change with age, since taste buds change as they are exposed to different flavors.
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting to suggest that food preferences can influence a person's personality, I do have to agree that loving bitter foods doesn't make you a bitter person, since it sounds a bit like pseudoscience. I do however think that the climate that a person grows up in, thus affecting what kind of food they have access to can influence the way they view food. This may sound bizarre to us, but in one example, people in Mongolia eat horse meat like it's ham or steak to us, but they live in a arid and cold climate so prioritization of livestock over agriculture makes sense. In another area like South America, the abundance of fruit and vegetables can allow you to live as a vegetarian or opportunistic omnivore, so you would probably conserve more animals. Ultimately, it might be more of a cultural aspect.
ReplyDeleteHi Helena! Thank you for your post. I also agree that this subject has cultural aspects to consider seriously. Thank you for highlighting that. Furthermore, I apologize if my post made it seem as though I was saying that the relationship between being bitter and liking bitter foods was causational because it isn’t; however, there is a correlation between them, and I was merely highlighting that correlation while tying in the information we learned about food from class to support this correlation further. If you’d like, you could review the real scientific article/ study that Karen Wu wrote about here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666315300428
DeleteIt is not pseudoscience, and I would like to highlight that in Wu’s article title, “9 Things That Your Food Might Say About Your Personality,” the operative word is “might.” However, I do appreciate that you did not merely take my blog post at face value and wanted to challenge the integrity of the source; a great psych professor of mine told my class that a lesson he wants to leave us with is “question everything in psychology” because of the rampant impacts of pseudoscience. Thank you again for your post; your comment made me consider the cultural aspect of diet regarding my post.