A love of intense sweetness shows a surprising link to financial choices

People who have a strong preference for intensely sweet tastes tend to grab a small reward available right now rather than wait for a larger one. New research published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that this impatience may be partly explained by a general aversion to risk, rather than a stronger pull toward bigger rewards. The findings may help clarify the psychological and biological mechanisms connecting reward sensitivity to decision-making.

Reward sensitivity describes how strongly a person is motivated by the prospect of a reward. Scientists usually measure it with questionnaires or behavioral tasks, but one more physiological method is testing a person’s preference for sweet tastes. The sweet-liking phenotype, an observable biological marker, sorts people into two groups based on whether they strongly prefer highly concentrated sugar solutions or milder sweetness. Being a sweet-liker, a characteristic that is about half heritable and stable across life, is considered a physiological indicator of heightened sensitivity to a basic sensory reward.

A 2014 study found that people who intensely enjoy sweet tastes are more prone to choosing smaller, immediate rewards over delayed ones, a behavior known as delay discounting. Delay discounting is an economic and psychological measure of impatience. It captures how much less a reward seems worth to a person as the wait to receive it grows longer.

Separate neuroscience work, such as a 2009 study, demonstrated that the human brain relies on partly overlapping neural circuits to calculate the value of both delayed rewards and uncertain gambles. This physical overlap suggests that time preferences and risk preferences share common roots. Building on that idea, a 2018 study showed that a person’s tolerance for risk systematically alters how impatient they appear on delay-discounting tests, highlighting risk sensitivity as a potential hidden driver of impulsive choices.

The new study connects these threads by investigating whether biological sweet preference is linked to impulsive choices specifically through a heightened sensitivity to risk. The research was conducted by Anna Davidovich, senior research fellow Ksenia Panidi, and their colleagues at the Centre for Cognition and Decision Making at HSE University in Moscow. The team aimed to determine whether the link between sweet-liking and impulsivity could be explained by an increased desire for larger rewards, a heightened urge for immediate gratification, or a general avoidance of the uncertainty that comes with waiting.

“The study was motivated by the observation that sweet-taste preferences were linked to various kinds of addictions, such as alcoholism and other substance use disorders,” Panidi told PsyPost. “This observation suggests that sweet-taste preferences might be more broadly linked to impulsive decision making, due to the possible involvement of the opioid system in the valuation of rewards.” The opioid system refers to the brain’s own opioid chemicals, such as endorphins, which help regulate pleasure and pain.

“If this is the case, these differences in sweet-taste preference should then show up in other contexts (not linked to food rewards) that also imply value-based choices,” she explained. “This was the hypothesis that we decided to test using economic choices.”

To explore this, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, 49 healthy adults completed a series of behavioral tasks. Participants took a standardized sweet-taste liking test, where they sampled five water solutions with varying concentrations of sucrose and rated their pleasantness. Those who rated the highest sucrose concentration as their favorite were classified as sweet-likers, while the rest were classified as sweet-dislikers.

It is important to distinguish this biological metric from everyday dietary habits. “The results of this study are very commonly misinterpreted as indicating that people who ‘like sweet food’ are more impulsive than those who don’t,” Panidi said. “In fact, sweet-taste preferences are very different from ‘sweet food preferences.’ Some studies even show that the correlation between the two is rather small.”

“The major difference is that the sweet-taste liking test only shows whether a person favors a sugar solution with the highest concentration of sucrose (i.e., 3 times higher than that of Coca-Cola),” she explained. “It does not necessarily mean that the same person would prefer sugary food, as food contains many more nutrients than just sugar (fats, proteins), which also affects food preferences.”

Participants also completed a lottery choice task to measure their risk preferences. In this task, they made 60 choices between a guaranteed payout of 100 monetary units and a risky lottery that offered up to 500 units at varying probabilities of winning (25, 50, or 75 percent).

After the lottery, they played a computerized balloon game, where they could earn real rubles by inflating a virtual balloon but would lose that balloon’s earnings if it popped. The taste test came first for 24 participants and last for the other 25, and the researchers controlled for this order, along with age and gender.

Twelve participants were classified as sweet-likers and 37 as sweet-dislikers. Sweet-likers did not rate the solutions as sweeter than sweet-dislikers did; they simply enjoyed the stronger ones more. The researchers found that sweet-likers were more risk-averse in the lottery choice task. They were less likely than sweet-dislikers to choose the lottery, and this gap held regardless of the prize size or the odds of winning.

However, the balloon task showed no differences between the two groups. The authors suggest this discrepancy might reflect that the lottery task involves explicit probabilities, while the balloon task requires people to learn about risk gradually through trial and error.

This aversion to risk ran counter to the researchers’ expectations. “Our initial hypothesis was that sweet-likers would be more prone to making impulsive choices which would also imply making risky choices, i.e., preferring an option where one can win bigger reward with some probability rather than taking a smaller amount of money for sure,” Panidi said. “However, we were surprised to see the opposite – sweet-likers showed higher preference for sure options compared to sweet-dislikers.”

“This might suggest that our common understanding of ‘impulsivity’ in risky contexts might be wrong,” she added. “In fact, making impulsive choices does not necessarily mean making risky choices. It might mean preference for more ‘tangible’ reward. If getting a small amount of money for sure feels more ‘tangible’ than playing a lottery, an impulsive person might prefer that small amount.”

In the second experiment, the research team recruited a new sample of 100 healthy adults to see how sweet-taste preferences relate to both risk and time delays. Because the task order had affected lottery choices in the first experiment, this time the taste test was always given last.

Alongside the same lottery choice task, participants completed a delay discounting task, which required them to choose between a smaller monetary reward available sooner and a larger reward available later. The two tasks were mixed together in blocks. Some of the delay choices offered the smaller reward immediately, while others enforced a delay for both the smaller and larger options.

Out of 100 participants, 28 were classified as sweet-likers. “I think an interesting observation is how stable the proportion of sweet-likers and sweet-dislikers in the population seems to be,” Panidi noted. “In our experiments, 25-30% of participants were classified as sweet-likers, which is pretty close to the proportions found in other countries where a similar method was used, such as South Korea or the UK.”

Sweet-likers again leaned toward the safe option, though in this larger sample the difference appeared only when the odds of winning were 50 percent, the point of greatest uncertainty. In the delay discounting task, the sweet-likers exhibited a specific pattern of impulsivity. When one of the rewards was available immediately, sweet-likers were more likely than sweet-dislikers to choose the immediate option.

But when both options required a waiting period, sweet-likers were actually more likely to choose the delayed, larger reward. Sweet-likers and sweet-dislikers did not differ in how strongly the size of the rewards or the length of the wait swayed their choices. Together, these patterns suggest that sweet-likers’ impatience is tied specifically to the availability of an immediate, certain outcome.

When the researchers accounted for each participant’s general risk aversion, the link between sweet-liking and choosing the immediate reward weakened by about 40 percent and fell just short of statistical significance. The authors interpret this as a sign that sweet-likers’ impatience may stem at least partly from a wariness of uncertainty: for someone who dislikes risk, a reward that arrives later can feel less certain than one in hand.

The two groups also looked alike on questionnaires. In the first experiment, sweet-likers and sweet-dislikers scored similarly on measures of sensation seeking and novelty seeking, and in the second they also did not differ on a standard impulsivity questionnaire or in how risky they rated themselves. The authors suggest that physiological and questionnaire-based measures of reward sensitivity may capture different things.

Panidi sees implications that reach beyond taste. “I think the main takeaway from this study is that the neurobiology of economic choice might have a much deeper physiological grounding than we might commonly think,” she told PsyPost. “At first, the link between sweet-taste preference and monetary choices might seem very indirect (how these two things might even be related?), but as we look deeper, we find that economic choices might be guided by our physiology just as much as our taste preferences.”

The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost earlier this year, which relied on long-running household surveys of about 14,000 people in the United Kingdom rather than laboratory choice tasks. That study found that people who felt more dread about possible financial losses tended to be both less willing to take risks and less willing to wait for rewards.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on laboratory tasks with small real-money stakes, which might not fully capture how people make high-stakes decisions in daily life. The effects were relatively small; in the first experiment, sweet-liking accounted for about 0.2 percent more of the variation in risky choices, and there were only 12 sweet-likers. The sample was limited as well: participants were young adults recruited in Moscow, and people with math, physics, economics, finance, or computer science backgrounds were excluded.

The delay discounting task offered only three sizes of sooner reward. This restricted range might have made it difficult to detect whether sweet-likers are more sensitive to the sheer size of a reward.

“I would not say practical significance is very important here,” Panidi said. “Rather, the results might be important for researchers as they suggest that we should further look into the mechanisms of opioid system involvement in economic or any other value-based choices. This might open the way to further investigation of addiction mechanisms.”

For instance, she suggested that “people who have preference for very sweet taste might be more prone to impulsive choices in various contexts, and knowing this might help them create the environment which discourages them from making unhealthy choices. But further studies are needed to make more solid conclusions.”

In addition, the lottery tasks in the study only involved positive gains, avoiding any scenarios where participants could lose money. Because the biological opioid systems linked to sweet-taste preferences may also be involved in evaluating threats, future studies could explore whether sweet-likers show a similar aversion to financial losses.

The research team also plans to observe these mechanisms more directly. “The next steps for this line of research would be in digging deeper into the neural differences between sweet-likers and sweet-dislikers, i.e., exploring what happens differently on the brain level when they make economic choices,” Panidi said.

The study, “Sweet-taste liking is associated with preference for less risky and immediate rewards in economic decision-making,” was authored by Anna Davidovich, Anna N. Shestakova, Nina Arzumanyan, and Ksenia Panidi.