Sweetness may be contagious. A growing body of research has revealed that the type of people who have a sweet tooth may also have a sweet temperament.
“According to the conceptual metaphor theory, metaphors such as ‘love is sweet’ may be more than just linguistic terms — they can build scaffolds to unconsciously guide our behavior,” says Michael Schaefer, a neuropsychologist at Medical School Berlin.
A Sweet Tooth and Sweet Temperament
In research published in 2012, Brian Meier, a psychologist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and his colleagues studied the potential link between sweets and temperament. They confirmed that people commonly believed those with a sweet tooth were typically more agreeable.
In other tests, the team gave sweet chocolate to some participants and non-sweet food like crackers to others, and found that the former were more likely to help people in need. They also found that people who professed a liking for sweet foods were more likely than those who did not like sweet foods to assist in cleaning up their city after a flood.
Not all researchers agreed with these findings. In 2014, Michael Ashton, a psychologist from Brock University in Canada, and his colleagues tried to replicate Meier’s 2012 findings by running similar experiments, but with a much larger number of participants. They couldn’t find a strong link between a preference for sweet food and an agreeable personality.
“We conclude that prosocial personality is not substantially associated with sweet taste preferences,” Ashton and his team wrote in their study.
Nonetheless, other researchers conducted similar tests, and did find a link between agreeableness and a taste for sweet food.
Read More: Sugar’s Bad Rep Is Worse Than The Sweet Stuff Itself
Cultural Differences
Not every culture perceives food the same way, just as not every culture necessarily has the same temperament. To address any potential cultural differences, Meier and his colleagues wanted to approach the question using participants from different countries.
“Cultures may be different both in taste preferences as well as in their temperament,” says Schaefer, who worked with Meier on a recent study published in the Journal of Research in Personality.
Their team tested participants from China, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. They asked people to rate their liking for salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy food, as well as what kinds of sweet foods they liked. They then compared these to results they gathered from an established questionnaire that examined the “Big Five” personality factors. Agreeableness is one of the five traits examined from this test. They found that the link between taste and personality were replicated in other cultures.
Schaefer notes there are some drawbacks to the study. Participants were asked to describe their own personalities, which may differ in some cases to the way others see them.
“In other words, individuals who like sweets may only see themselves as being more social and being a sweetie — but this may not reflect their real behavior or the view by others,” he says.
A sweet tooth may not be the only thing that affects agreeableness. Schaefer says that in some countries, preferences for salty food may be also linked to agreeableness. But the evidence isn’t as strong.
Sweets and Childhood
Schaefer says there are several theories why taste and agreeableness might be linked, though he says that these are mostly speculative at this point. One of them may start in childhood. Some people may learn to associate the sweetness of breast milk or baby formula with social caring — a correlation that continues into adulthood.
Or it might go back even further than our childhood.
“The preference for sweet food may be innate to all of us, because sweet food offers a primary energy source and the preference for this taste may enable us to look for plants with high available glucose,” Schaefer says. “Moreover, sweet food provides information on potential beneficial effects of food in contrast to bitter taste, which signals toxicity.”
These sentiments could lead to links between sweet preference and sociability, or approachableness. “Given this link, we may tend to act more social, when we like sweet taste, because we may seek consistency in our perceptions,” says Schaefer.
Researching Personal Health
For some researchers, there’s more to finding a simple correlation between food preference and temperament. Some are researching the connection between obesity and sweets, and how having a sweet tooth might put someone in a romantic mindset.
“Considering that psychological effects of sweet taste include prosocial and outgoing behavior, one might speculate that a training to improve sweet taste might change depressive symptoms and/or overweight and obesity,” Schaefer and Eileen Garbow wrote in their 2021 study on the topic.
But they cautioned that “the research on psychological sweet effects is still in its infancy,” and that “it remains unclear whether the psychological effects may be used to improve an individual’s health.”
This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
American Psychological Association. Sweet taste preferences and experiences predict prosocial inferences, personalities, and behaviors.
Science Daily. People with a 'sweet tooth' have sweeter dispositions
Journal of Research in Personality. Do prosocial people prefer sweet-tasting foods? An attempted replication of Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, and Robinson (2012)
Individual Differences. Dispositional Properties of Metaphor
Journal of Research in Personality. Cross-cultural evidence for an association between agreeableness and sweet taste preferences
Applied Sciences. Psychological Effects of Sweet Taste and Sweet Taste Preference
Joshua Rapp Learn is an award-winning D.C.-based science writer. An expat Albertan, he contributes to a number of science publications like National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, New Scientist, Hakai, and others.
