Does Someone Like Bitter Food and Drink?

A particular liking for bitter-tasting foods and drinks such as coffee and tonic water could mean you have psychopathic tendencies.

Psychologists have found that those with a preference for bitter tastes were more likely to exhibit signs of Machiavellianism, sadism, and narcissism.

That is, they were more prone to being duplicitous and self-serving, cold-hearted and lacking in empathy, vain and selfish, and more likely to derive pleasure from other people’s pain.

The findings of the study provide the ‘first empirical evidence that bitter taste preferences are linked to malevolent personality traits,’ said the researchers from Innsbruck University in Austria, who studied 1,000 people in two separate experiments.

‘The results suggest that how much people like bitter-tasting foods and drinks is stably tied to how dark their personality is.’