Does Preferring Sugary Flavors Make You a More Helpful Person?
When the weather is this cold out, who doesn’t enjoy sipping hot chocolate and snacking on scrumptious sweet cupcakes or cookies (especially those this time of year with green and red frosting)? Maybe you’ve realized that as soon as you finished the sweet snack you were happier, more complacent and had an overall more positive lookout on life.
What makes this happen? Is it the “sugar high” that you’ve heard of before? Or is there an actual personality trait that can be linked to consuming sweets?
Groups of researchers at North Dakota State University, Saint Xavier University and Gettysburg College have done a new study to see if people with a “sweet tooth” seem to have sweeter personalities also, and to see if eating sweet treats can increase one’s willingness to help others out.
The report, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explores the possibility of a connection between sweet tastes and pro-social behavior. Titled “Sweet Taste Preferences and Experiences Predict Pro-Social Influences, Personalities and Behaviors,” the study is a collection of five studies which all relate to one another. Each individual study was regulated for positive mood so that the resulting effects did not come from the immediate satisfaction that can come after eating a sugary and sweet treat.
One study revealed that individuals who ate a particular brand of chocolate were more apt to help a person in need, as compared to a person who ate only a cracker. While the individuals who like sweet foods, such as soda, chocolate cake and candy, can be more likeable, agreeable, and helpful. This doesn’t necessarily imply that they will be more extroverted, neurotic or hyperactive.
Could this be why we call someone “sweet” when they are nice to others? Maybe there is an inherited wisdom that sweets make us, well, sweeter, and these embodied metaphors are actually an accurate window into our behavior and personality traits.
A different study discovered that individuals who had a preference for sugary foods, compared to individuals who did not, were more apt to help their peers. The sweet food fans were much more likely to volunteer to clean up their city after a major flood took place, which suggests that a sweet tooth can tell how helpful or nice someone is, depending on how much they like sweet foods. In a controlling experiment, the researchers studied people who had a preference for the other four taste types, which are salt, bitter, sour, and savory. These people had no link between the personality trait agreeableness and their preferred type of flavors.
The researchers explain that while these taste metaphors can make accurate personality predictions in our own culture, it may have different consequences in other cultures. Cross-culture research would need to be conducted to determine just how deep these metaphors go, as it might change across vastly different cultures.
