You Have a Sweet Tooth? Bet You Have a Sweet Personality as Well!

The connection between sweet foods and sweet personalities may be more than metaphor. A series of five studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who prefer sweet-tasting foods also tend to be more agreeable, helpful, and cooperative — suggesting that the sensory experience of sweetness and the concept of a "sweet" personality share more than linguistic coincidence.

In one experiment, participants who ate a sweet food (versus a non-sweet food or nothing) reported greater willingness to help strangers with tasks. In another, people who reported liking sweet foods also reported higher agreeableness on personality measures.

The researchers, Brian Meier and colleagues, proposed that the association works through what psychologists call embodied cognition — the idea that physical sensations and abstract concepts are linked in the brain in ways that allow each to activate the other. Because sweetness is universally associated with pleasant experiences from infancy, and because "sweet" is also used metaphorically to describe kind behavior across cultures and languages, the two concepts may be stored in overlapping neural networks.

This is part of a broader body of research on how physical sensations influence social judgment and behavior. Studies have found that people holding warm beverages judge strangers as having warmer personalities, that people in physically clean environments make harsher moral judgments, and that heavy clipboards make people treat information as more weighty.

The sweet personality research is preliminary and the effect sizes are modest — you shouldn't assume the person reaching for the dessert menu is necessarily kinder than the one who passes. But it adds to a growing picture of how thoroughly the body and the social mind are intertwined.