Friday, October 28, 2011

LIKING SWEETS MAKES YOU AGREEABLE

People who like sweet foods tend to be (and to seem) more agreeable than people with a taste for other fare, a series of studies show.
Several dozen students looked at head shots of strangers, paired with a brief reference to each stranger's favorite food. They then rated the strangers on a scale of 1 to 6 for traits like agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism. The people who favored foods like honey or candy got higher ratings for agreeableness than those who liked lemons or grapefruit.
Did those impressions reflect reality? Another set of students listed taste preferences and then took a personality test. The sweet lovers did, indeed, score higher on the agreeableness scale. In a third experiment, involving 108 people, liking sweet foods correlated with expressing a desire to help clean up after a (real) nearby flood.
"Sweet Taste Preferences and Experiences Predict Prosocial Inferences, Personalities, and Behaviors," Brian P. Meier, Sara K. Moeller, Miles Riemer-Peltz and Michael D. Robinson, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (forthcoming)
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