Bitter Tastes May Lead to Bitter People

According to City University of New York’s Kendall Eskine, experiencing bitter tastes can lead to a person making harsher judgment calls. This could explain why every time I drink coffee in the morning I feel like I could punch a baby in its big baby face. But I digress.

The study was conducted like this: Eskine and a few colleagues asked 57 volunteers to rate a series of questions on a 100-point scale. The more a question was morally questionable, the higher the score. These questions ranged from “what is your political orientation” to “how do you feel about second cousins engaging in consensual sex,” and a wide range of questions in between. Around the mid-way point of the Q & A, the participants were given a beverage. Some of these beverages consisted of a sweet juice, while others were given something more bitter. Others were given water.

The results? Those who drank the bitter concoction scores questions, on average, 27 points higher than those who drank sweet beverages or water.

The question is still out over how tastes or particular foods tie into behavioral tendencies, but these studies add weight to my theory: That Starbucks is secretly trying to poison the minds of morning commuters to breed an army of slightly annoyed jerkoffs that I run into all the time. Of course, I could be wrong.

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