The eating habits that show your partner may be a narcissist
Psychologists have focused on a series of eating habits that could give you a clue that the person across the dinner table might be a narcissist.
They discovered that eating meat is a… A telltale sign associated with the personality disorder — especially if the person gives a “hierarchical justification,” such as “people are at the top of the food chain,” according to researchers.
Scientists theorized that narcissists’ preference for meat stemmed from “Dark Triad” personality traits “which were linked to more negative attitudes toward animals.”
“Psychopathy,” they noted, “is also associated with behavior that demonstrates animal abuse.”
A performative preference for healthy foods in social situations was another trait associated with narcissists, and a tendency to overestimate the health benefits of treats such as red wine and dark chocolate, as well as so-called ‘superfoods’, in private.
“Grand narcissists exhibit a great desire to maintain a pretentious self-image,” the researchers found, leading to “a stronger focus on health risks when narcissists were exposed to a social environment.”
However, many of these differences between narcissistic and habitual eating habits disappeared when the researchers looked exclusively at women.
This difference between the sexes could be linked to past evidence suggesting that “dieting may function primarily as a feminine strategy in mating and status competition,” as a team of psychologists in China theorized.
According to a growing body of research, a trait associated with narcissists was performative or showy preference for healthy foods when eating in social situations, including a tendency to overestimate the health benefits of treats, such as red wine and dark chocolate, and “superfoods.”
For carnivores, the research linking narcissism to meat-eating came from a series of studies published in 2019 by German psychologist Dr. Rayna Sariyska-Garvels and her colleagues.
Their work focused not only on the clinical definition of narcissism, but also on related ‘Dark Triad’ traits such as manipulative behavior or ‘Machiavellianism’ and psychopathy.
Dr. Sariyska-Garvels’ work linked eating habits to narcissism through tracking seven core emotional systems detectable in the brain and based on neurobiological testing: seeking, worry, play, lust, anger, fear and sadness.
Of these seven emotional systems, ‘seeking’ and ‘care’ were strongly associated with fruit and vegetable consumption, while the other five (‘play’, ‘lust’, ‘anger’, ‘fear’ and ‘sadness’) were were. not.
“Worry, sadness (and) fear,” the team wrote in the diary Frontiers in psychology‘were negatively associated with red meat and pork consumption.’
In contrast, “anger” – a core emotion most closely linked to narcissism and other Dark Triad traits such as Machiavellianism and psychopathy – was “positively associated with eating meat,” according to Dr. Sariyska-Garvels and her co-authors.
A total of 1,140 participants took part in the first half of the study and 444 participants in the second half, each completing an ‘Eating Behavior Questionnaire’, an ‘Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale’ test and a ‘Short Dark Triad Scale’ test . .
People who scored at least 3.08 on a narcissism scale of one to seven perceived much greater health risks in a durian fruit if they were exposed to the fruit in a social situation (figure above). Scientists picked the Asian fruit because it was unknown to most Western subjects, allowing them to better verify the information
However, as in other studies, this apparent association was only present when male subjects were included.
A 2022 study found that male narcissists showed a greater tendency toward “disordered eating” (38.9 percent correlation) and “emotional eating” (30.8 percent correlation).
“One explanation for the results obtained,” wrote psychologist Dr. Liping Shi, the study’s lead author, “is that narcissism is positively associated with impulsivity.”
But the Dark Triad trait of Machiavellianism has actually helped women avoid the “reckless eating behavior” documented in similarly manipulative men, Dr. Shi noted in his 2022 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Dr. Shi attributed this to two factors, the first of which was societal pressure on women to be thin.
The second emerged from previous research showing that those high in Machiavellian orientation have strategic planning and a longer-term orientation.”
“Perhaps these characteristics may promote a slow living strategy,” Dr. Shi wrote, “and thereby reduce uncontrolled eating behavior.”
Nevertheless, research in the journal Psychology and Marketing last year brings with it a warning for those hoping to uncover the narcissism of a friend, loved one, or colleague through that person’s public eating habits.
Although narcissists seemed to be overly optimistic about the supposed health benefits of food – including questionably healthy treats like wine, chocolate and nuts – their tendency to indulge seems to only strike in private.
In the case of chocolate, the narcissistic participants in the study were 25 percent more likely to view chocolate as healthier, but especially in private.
The explanation is that while narcissists are often eager to enrich themselves or indulge in their hedonistic pleasures, they are also status-seeking and wary of “threats to their self-image,” according to researchers Renaud Lunardo and Jana Gross.
“Individuals high in narcissism in social situations adopt a protective strategy for their self-image,” Lunardo and Gross wrote, “focusing more on food health hazards and consequently abstaining more from consuming such foods.”
So those looking for feeding clues for a narcissist may have to be as sneaky and manipulative as a narcissist themselves.
Narcissists, according to their research, were also more likely to indulge in foods that they saw as a high-octane boost that could “help achieve performance goals,” which Lunardo and Gross attribute to the competitive nature of the personality type.
“Some foods that are high in calories, sugar, and fat and that can be viewed as energy or ‘fuel’ for the body,” they also noted, “are attractive to narcissists.”
This category included products labeled as ‘superfoods’, based on research published in the Journal of Consumer Research – anything that gives the narcissist an edge in the game of status and resource competition, they claim.
To further prove their point, Lunardo and Gross also tested their public-private theory on a type of food their subjects were unfamiliar with, to avoid preconceived health ideas: durian fruit.
Scientists teaching at the KEDGE Business School in France picked the Asian fruit because it was unknown to most Western subjects, allowing them to better control the flow of information.
Participants who scored at least 3.08 on a narcissism scale of one to seven perceived much higher health risks in a durian fruit when exposed to it in a social situation than when exposed in private, helping to confirm the narcissist’s obsession with social status.