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People Who Prefer Black Coffee Are More Likely To Have Psychopathic Or Sadistic Traits, Study Finds (rd.com)
A new study conducted at the University of Innsbruck in Austria finds that people who drink their coffee black often has psychopathic or sadistic traits. The study surveyed more than 1,000 adults about their taste preferences with foods and drinks that are bitter. They also took four different personality tests that assessed traits like narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, and aggression. From a report: Researchers found a trend that suggested a correlation between preferences for black coffee, and other bitter tastes, and sadistic or psychopathic personality traits. They also found that people who enjoyed milky or sugary coffee, and other sweet flavors, generally tended to have more "agreeable" personality traits like sympathy, cooperation, and kindness. The closest correlation found in the study was between bitter foods, like radishes and tonic water, and "everyday sadism," or the enjoyment of inflicting moderate levels of pain on others. The researchers went further, suggesting that this association between bitter foods and psychopathic tendencies could "become chronic" and get worse with time.
I like my coffee like I like my opium: strong and black. My sadistic trait is ridiculing people who can't use basic grammar.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This piece of shit study is making the rounds again. So I guess all the douche bros who like IPA beer are psychos? Makes sense.
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Does the study say anything about people that have their own brand of coffee?
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It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
For many years, I didn't enjoy black coffee. But I was honest enough to call what I drank "liquid coffee candy". As I got older, I found that I enjoyed black coffee more. It allows you to enjoy more subtle flavors which cream, sugar, and flavorings cover up.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Is that their whole models have R^2 somewhere between 0.01 and 0.06. That's for all the tastes and the higher end of those correlations is for all the dark personality traits too.
Oh, and liking salty things was a stronger predictor of sadism than bitter was.
If it were almost any other drug you'd be in jail, but if it's caffeine, you can brag about your addiction and no one will bat an eye.
I heard someone point out that if we had discovered alcohol today then it would be classified as a schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. This would be fairly accurate as it is a highly addictive intoxicating substance, with no accepted medicinal value, and having high probability of mental or physical harm. Caffeine in high doses likely meets this standard as well. As would tobacco.
One problem with this is the standard for addiction seems rather subjective. Addiction is just a mental or physical craving for a substance. Are people "addicted" to air? Or food? Well, there are some cases of a food addiction but this is often a sign of an underlying mental or physical condition. I recall a cabbage craving was considered a sign of some physical problem, and people self medicating by eating foam from couch cushions. Of course there are better treatments for diseases than eating gobs of cabbage, and certainly eating foam padding is not all that healthy.
As someone that deals with chronic pain I hear the word "addiction" far too often. There's even a term for seeking medication outside of merely abusing the substance, "pseudo-addiction". Addiction is, again, so subjective that it's lost all meaning to me. There's claims of people being addicted to video games, watching porn, washing their hands, and so many other behaviors. What makes taking a drug, drinking coffee, or smoking a cigarette an addiction over merely a bad habit? I've heard it somewhere that tobacco use is not an addiction if it's not used more than once per month. So, a person is "addicted" if they like to have a cigarette with his smoking friends when they meet on the weekend for poker and pizza? Are they also addicted to poker and pizza then?
I'm thinking we need a better word than addiction for such cravings, or we need to need to better define addiction to something other than merely something that can be mistaken for routine, medical needs, or bad habits. I don't want to be accused of being an addict just because I have not had my pain properly managed by physicians. It seems we've created a health care system so handcuffed by the government's fear of addiction that they can't do their job.
I remember hearing on how there's an "epidemic" among veterans for their opiate use, being prescribed opiates far above the general population. Well, no shit Sherlock! The average population isn't shot at, blown up, dropped from helicopters, marched for miles with 100 pounds on their backs, or put in considerable peril by an LT with a map. I won't doubt that there is an opiate abuse problem, but people need to be treated as individuals and not as some average member of the general population. The average member of the population has one testicle, one ovary, and 1.99 legs, which has little to do with how an individual is treated.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Well, once you filter it through a typical reporter's capacity for understanding, Relativity is BS.
What the studies in question actually do is correlate a generalized preference for bitter tastes to antisocial personality traits. This would have almost no correlation to liking specific bitter foods, particularly black coffee, which is also a cocktail of pharmacologically acrtive compounds -- including of course caffeine, which is a potent stimulator of the brain's dopamine-mediated reward mechanisms. Beer, likewise, is usually bitter, but alcohol is also a powerful dopamine stimulatior.
But even repeated exposures to non-psychoactive bitter foods can habituate people, and eventually make those foods desirable. We crave what we are accustomed to eating, even if it is radicchio. Many vegetables have bitter components, which is why you have to learn to like them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This kind of BS discredits the entire scientific community.
I think the causal implication is a bit junky but a correlation isn't implausible.
Black coffee and bitter foods are both things that create a bit of culinary conflict, one of the reasons to consume them is to create a strong sensation even if it's a bit unpleasant.
Psychopaths and sadists are also people who tend to seek out stronger sensations, psychopaths because they have muted emotions and sadists because they enjoy the discomfort.
If this correlation is legit I'd expect sociopaths and sadists to enjoy spicy food as well.
I stole this Sig
In the Feds they sell instant coffee, nondairy creamer, and artificial sweetener on the Commissary.
Well... real correlations with crappy R2 do mean that there's some connection between the two things.
First off, there's spurious correlations--where the most reasonable explanation for a statistically significant correlation (where the R2 is actually a very high value) is that it's just a really, really, really weird coincidence. This site lets you explore examples, and some have a very strong R^2 while also being quite unlikely to actually have a correlation--for example, the divorce rate in Maine correlates to the per capita consumption of margarine with an R^2 of 0.99...but there is no reasonable mechanism by which one could influence the other. That's actually part of why you're generally supposed to include some sort of theory when you're trying to show correlations, unless your goal is to create demonstrations of why it's wrong to assume that correlation even implies connection, no less causation.
Next, a R^2 of 0.02 is...fantastically low. The range is from 0 to 1, because it's basically a ratio. You can think of it very accurately as a measure of how well the line you just drew on the graph paper correlates to the data points--with 1 being the point at which it's perfect and 0 being where it has no relationship whatsoever.
Last? The usual cutoff for statistical significance in psych research is 0.05. Statistical significance is the point where you feel the correlation is strong enough that it isn't just cause by error--and one major cause of error is choosing a too-low threshold. And, well, 0.02 is less than half the normal threshold...