A growing body of evidence is making clear the links between what we taste and how we feel: Repulsion is repulsion, whether caused by a shameful act or a rotten egg. “Your brain can’t tell the difference between something that tastes bad and something that makes you feel morally violated,” says Kendall Eskine, a cognitive psychologist at Loyola University in New Orleans.
The findings suggest a link between having a sweet tooth and a sweet disposition — a link that the study documented in other ways too. People rated themselves as more agreeable and they were more generous with their time, for example, after eating a small piece of sweet chocolate than after eating a sour candy or a bland cracker. They also rated pictures of random faces more highly if captions explained that those people liked sweet foods.
People who were told in a study to drink a bitter-tasting herbal supplement offered particularly harsh judgments of morally questionable scenarios about things such as like a library book-stealing student or a man eating his own already-dead dog. Participants who drank a sweet berry punch or water, Loyola’s Eskine and colleagues reported last year in the journal Psychological Science, weren’t so condemning. Disgust proved especially strong for people who described themselves as politically conservative.
On the flip side, Eskine’s group found more recently that thinking about morally loaded acts can also change the way food tastes. Given a neutral-tasting shot of diluted blue Gatorade, participants in a study in press at the journal PLoS One thought the beverage tasted more delicious after reading about someone being morally virtuous and more disgusting after reading about a moral transgression.
“All of these little incidental bodily experiences can change or shape our judgments. There’s more and more evidence of that popping up all the time,” he says. “I don’t think we are victims to our bodies, but awareness can help us from making really harsh judgments just because we are drinking something gross.”