U. Illinois professor finds correlation between soup and personality-(U. Illinois)
U-WIRE
By Erika Rowell
December 09, 2000
(U-WIRE) CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- People who like tomato soup can't stop talking about their pets. Those who favor chili-beef soup usually participated in high school sports. At least this is what Champaign-Urbana area waitresses and a study by Brian Wansink, University of Illinois professor of agricultural and consumer economics and nutritional sciences, say.
In a study on differences in individual food tastes and why they differ, Wansink correlated the soups people prefer with personality traits.
"We don't know what factors make you like chocolate and me vanilla," Wansink said. "The basic idea is to get at the psychological factors as to why people like the things they do."
In order to find the correlation between soup and personality, Wansink went to the experts: experienced waitresses.
"We needed someone familiar with people and soup, so we went to 32 different waitresses in the Midwest who had around an average of eight years experience," Wansink said.
In Champaign, the study involved waitresses from the Elite Diner and Merry Ann's Diner. Wansink said that if you ask an experienced waitress, "If the soup of the day is (i.e. tomato), what does this person look like?," the waitress can tell you what the person is like, how they tip and what they eat, among other traits.
The study found around 27 waitresses who had strong opinions about what these different types of people were like.
Lisa Moreno, a waitress at the Elite Diner in Urbana, has eight years of waitressing experience and said she often has an idea of what people want when they come in. When asked about a typical tomato-soup eater, Moreno said it will probably be a woman who is middle-aged or older.
After talking with waitresses, the next step in the study was a random telephone survey across the 50 states, assessing people's opinion of 12 common soup products. The survey included adults over 18 and included 602 women and 401 men, according to a press release. Wansink looked at the people with strong preferences for a soup and then went back to the waitresses, asking which profile went with which soup. He said the waitresses found the task easy.
"Now that we can show differences (between soup and personalities), we can show how people who eat (foods like) soy are different from people who don't eat soy," Wansink said. "From here, we can determine how to target these people and encourage them to eat soy. Soup was just a fun context to look at (these) things from."
The four most popular soups from the survey were chicken noodle, tomato, minestrone and vegetable, according to a press release.
According to the soup personality profile, someone who orders chicken-noodle soup is high on the church-going scale, fond of pets and more likely to be stubborn and less outdoorsy. Minestrone's fans were more likely to be physically fit, nutritionally conscious, family-spirited, unlikely to own a pet and on a restricted diet. Vegetable-soup eaters fall into the category of a homebody at heart, less likely to be a world traveler or spontaneous and more likely to read family and home magazines. Tomato-soup lovers are more along the lines of adventure lovers, are more social and tend to enjoy books and their pets, according to a press release.
Soup, according to Wansink, is a comfort food.
"Soup consumption seemed to mirror childhood memories and remembered comforts," Wansink said in a press release.
Wansink said that men like warm comfort foods while women prefer cold comfort foods. Ice cream topped the lists of both men and women, but the next three for women included chocolate, chips and cookies, while men had meat, pasta, pizza and soup as the next choices on their list.
"As people get older, past the age of 35, soup becomes more of a comfort food," Wansink said.
"If someone orders steak or chicken, you can immediately (list aspects of their) personality type," he said. Even when you use more subtle foods, you can still tell a difference."
(C) 1999 Daily Illini via U-WIRE
This news story is not produced by the American Psychological Association and does not necessarily represent the opinions of the association.