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.

Comments

This is stupid junk science.

[Hey_Jude_Jesus]

This kind of BS discredits the entire scientific community.

Re:This is stupid junk science.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Translation: we found a tenuous statistical correlation that will make for an awesome headline.

Re:This is stupid junk science.

[alvinrod]

I take like 80% milk.

No, you take your milk with 20% coffee.

Re:This is stupid junk science.

[ceoyoyo]

They mention previous studies where bitter taste preference was associated with more openness. So exhibitionism. Check.

Re:This is stupid junk science.

[hey!]

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.

Re:This is stupid junk science.

[rtb61]

Seems logical. Coffee is not just coffee, it is caffeine and also bitter as well altering digestive chemistry. So the nature of the individual and their preference for that drink, drunk in that matter and the amount they choose to drink. Psychopaths are not psychopaths because they choose to be that way, they are born that way and likely are unable to properly produce the brain chemical state of 'happiness', which has a profound affect on their psychology. This will reflect in their food choices, their tastes and those taste are not just tastes, those tastes are often molecular precursors for all sorts of brain chemicals, you will teach yourself to choose the ones that feed the nature of your brain, of your personality.

I switch from coffee to alkalised cocoa (that wash the chocolate powered with and alkalised solution which reacts with the bitter acidic elements obviating the need for sugar). Over time it all alter health and recovery state and produced a more at peace digestive tract and altered behaviour as a result, drinking a bean broth, with a little raw sugar and milk, versus drinking chemicals extracts of a burnt bean. Yeah, fuckers, you are what you eat, suck it up or should I say imbibe, so as not to exclude, drunk or smoked or swallowed or snorted or injected and how ever you choose your poisons.

I would expect psychos also prefer cocaine (excitement) and opioids (the missing happy) over a combination of THC and CBD. I would also expect psychos would be very displeased to be exposed by their behavioural patterns preferring to stab everyone else in the back. I can understand exactly why they would prefer black coffee a stimulant, it is their nature.

Re:This is stupid junk science.

[TechyImmigrant]

This kind of BS discredits the entire scientific community.

Go read the paper http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp...

It makes no stupid claims. The report only weak association (e.g. r = 0.15 for one of them).

Meanwhile the journalist Shannon Donohue wrote "Do you prefer your morning joe sans cream and sugar? A new study says you're probably a psychopath with sadistic tendencies.". Shannon Donohue is another bad journalist who's first impulse on reading a paper is to lie about it in an article.

As a black coffee drinker

[denisbergeron]

I develop psychopathic and Sadistic Traits when I'm in line to order a coffee and the person(s) before me, ask for a double cream, piñata, spicey, cassonade, maple, cappuccino, with a gest of cittrus some cannelle and stuff like that

Re:As a black coffee drinker

[TeknoHog]

Those who can't drink their coffee neat shouldn't be counted as coffee drinkers. If you like milky drinks with a splash of coffee, fine, but please don't call the whole thing coffee. It's like saying "I'm a C programmer, but I don't really know much C, I only use it via the Python interpreter".

Re: As a black coffee drinker

[Cmdln Daco]

It means you're an enabler.

Re:As a black coffee drinker

[alvinrod]

Also, most people's experience with black coffee is Folgers or similar low quality grounds that are much closer to loose dirt or discarded pencil shavings than it is to coffee. Get some good beans that you grind yourself and prepare appropriately and black coffee can have a wonderful flavor profile that needs no additives to enjoy.

Re:As a black coffee drinker

[Trogre]

Wait, you water down your coffee? Fine, but don't call it coffee.

Chew the beans like a man.

Re:As a black coffee drinker

[blindseer]

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.

Good to know for job interviews.

[BitterOak]

If you're interviewing for a job and the interviewer offers you coffee, be sure to take cream and sugar even if you normally don't. Otherwise you might be signalling you're a psychopath or sadist. Of course, the reverse advice applies if you are applying for a police or correctional officer position.

Re:Good to know for job interviews.

[93 Escort Wagon]

When coffee is bad, I do take both cream and sugar. In a job interview I’m likely going to assume any proferred coffee is going to be bad, so...

JANEWAY!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This one fact completely explains pretty much the entire series of Star Trek Voyager.

Nonsense

[glenebob]

I love black coffee, radishes, bitter-sweet chocolate, and gin and tonic. And I hope everyone involved in this study dies in a fire.

Re:Welp.

[Cinnamon Beige]

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...