How sweet it is

We tend to use metaphors on a daily basis to describe people without even thinking about. How often do you say or think, “That girl/guy is hot!” It’s a metaphor, unless they have spilled a coffee over themselves or engaged in navigating the Gobi desert, the reality is that their body temperature is roughly the same as everyone else’s. They aren’t literally combusting before your eyes so you have used a metaphor but one that we all understand. It’s just words though, isn’t it? Maybe it is more than words if a new study is anything to go by.

In the study researchers found that people who chose sweet food (chocolate) compared with non-sweet food (a cracker) or no food were more likely to help another person in need. They also found that people\\\’s general conception is that people who like sweet food like chocolate, sweets, or cake are also more agreeable and helpful.

On the surface taste would seem to have little in common with personality or behaviour. Yet, the findings of this study support a psychological notion dubbed “embodied metaphor”.

Embodied metaphor was conceived by psychiatrist George Lakoff and argues that almost all of human thinking depends on and making use of the senses and the emotions. So your conception of the world grows out of your perception, movement, and physical experience. Effectively your body creates your consciousness. If that is the case, no wonder that labelling someone as “sweet” actually has a correlation with the physical sensation of sweetness.

This current study also established that “sweet toothed” people scored higher on being “agreeable” and were more likely to volunteer cleaning up their city after a major flood compared with those who did not have a liking for sweet food.

The researchers concluded that a person’s helpfulness or niceness is associated with a preference for sweet food. If this holds true for other food preferences, and those preferences also reflect personality traits, it could be bad news for all those offal fanciers out there.