Black Coffee Or Dark Chocolate Fans Are Psychopaths, Study

If you are a black coffee lover then you can brace up for some surprising news. Researchers sayd that people who like to drink strong, black coffee tend to be psychopathic. Scientists from Innsruck University in Austria studied the taste preferences of a 1,000 people, and confirmed that those who like to drink bitter notes like those in black coffee and dark chocolate tend to show signs of "malevolent personality traits", such as "Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and everyday sadism," reported The Huffington Post.

The study was published in late September in Appetite.

Dividing the groups into two, the scientists asked the participants to rate, on a scale of one to six, how much they liked food and drinks classified into "bitter, sweet, sour or salty".

The same participants finished four personality tests that judged their how aggressive or manipulative they are, and also assessed specific traits that showed their psychopathic tendencies.

In another test, the "Big Five" personality dimensions, including "extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience" were all tested for overall consistency checks.

Some questions were asked, such as: "Given enough provocation, I may hit someone?" and "I tend to be callous or insensitive," according to Fox News.

Among the four tastes, a participant's tendency to prefer bitter food, which included "beer, tonic water and even radishes", pointed the ways to judge personality. The test showed that "how much people like bitter-tasting foods and drinks is stably tied to how dark their personality is."

"Regression analyses confirmed that this association holds when controlling for sweet, sour, and salty taste preferences and that bitter taste preferences are the overall strongest predictor compared to other taste preferences," researchers said. "The data thereby provide novel insights into the relationship between personality and the ubiquitous behaviors of eating and drinking by consistently demonstrating a robust relation between increased enjoyment of bitter foods and heightened sadistic proclivities."

Contrary to this, those who had "agreeable" personality traits, such as kindness, did not like "bitter tastes".

However, why some people like certain kinds of food, and not others, is not too clear. After all, it might be a biological or psychological mechanism, or a combination of both that leads them towards certain kinds of preferences.