This Psychologist Will Tell You Exactly What Whisky to Drink Based on Your Personality

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society really wants you to find a whisky that deeply speaks to your inner self. To that end, they hooked up with Dr. Adam Moore, a psychologist and research scientist who is now based at the University of Edinburgh. With Dr. Moore's help, the Society laboriously developed a personality test that will direct you to the whisky of your dreams.

This psychometric personality test—now available on the Flavour Behavior website—uses 35 test questions to help pair you with a whisky taste profile. Are you likely to be a "light and delicate" whisky lover? Or is your personality directing you to whiskies that are "spicy and dry"? Why take a chance with just any arbitrary whisky when the right whisky for your particular set of horrific quirks and off-putting neuroses is waiting for you?

We wanted to learn more, so we reached out to Dr. Moore to find out how the Flavour Behavior tests was developed and what it can tell us.

MUNCHIES: Hi, Dr. Moore. How did you end up working with the Scotch Malt Whisky Society on both the study and on Flavour Behavior? Dr. Moore: The Society came to me and wanted to know if there was any way to predict what kind of whisky people would like based on scientific psychology. I had done work in judgment and decision making, although I'd never looked to food or drink preferences before. They had their eye on personality tests of some sort. I told them I had never actually thought about it, but after doing a little bit of research, I realized that nobody had tried to do it before. So I thought it was really interesting.

You use the "Big 5" personality characteristics model in your project. Can you describe that model in lay terms? So there have been several decades of [research] looking at ways to measure basic personality traits. One of the leading theoretical models is that we have five personality factors and these are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These five traits together form the basis of our personality. There are various other aspects to our personalities, of course, but these are the five core underlying things that form the heart of our own unique psychological makeup from the personality side of things.

How did you go about selecting the questions for the test? We started with a basic set of questions that we know from psychometric work are very good at measuring these five personality factors. And then, because we wanted the test people take on the website to be based in real science, but also short enough and fun enough that people would enjoy it, we whittled down from a full-blown personality test to a bunch of smaller questions that still measure the core of each trait. We changed them a little to make them more fun and quirky.

And how do you know people will be accurate in their responses? That's always a risk when you ask people questions in tests like this. When we give people full-blown personality tests, we ask somewhat similar questions in multiple ways so we have different opportunities to see whether people are being consistent in their responses. For this particular test, we didn't want people sitting in front of the computer for an hour—because that's not much fun—so we kind of just have to trust that people are going to be interested enough to answer honestly.

How many different whiskies do you have as options in the test and how do they correlate to the personality archetypes? The way we went about doing this is to use whisky flavor profiles. Then we looked at connections between personality traits and the preferences for those specific whisky profiles. On that basis we were able to identify links and we built an algorithm that respected the links that we found in the statistical models. Then, on the basis of which traits people are most extreme on, we make suggestions.

Did you take the test and were you surprised by the whisky you were paired with? One of the recommendations the algorithm made for me was not a flavor profile I'd ever tried before. I did get to try some new whiskies that I was surprised by—and found to be lovely.

I read that you said that taste preference is the least understood of the senses. Why is that? Compared to what we know about how the visual and auditory systems work, we know comparatively little about why people like the flavors that they like. So that's why I thought it was a really interesting opportunity to see whether or not basic personality traits—which generally speaking have not been used or thought of as predictors of something like taste, but rather are used to predict behavior in social situations—would be linked to taste preferences. And it turns out that there seems to be a link.

So were there any big surprises in the results of the test? Yes. I made several predictions, just on my own, based on my intuition, which in the absence of any hard evidence from previous research is kind of where you have to start. And I was wrong about almost all of them. I don't want to ruin it or give away the fun for people who want to take the test, but it did surprise me to find out that as people become more and more extreme in certain particular personality traits they actually prefer certain types of whisky less and less. I didn't expect those results, but that's the fun part of science—you always get to be surprised.

I've read that the CIA uses personality tests in recruiting and that they look for people who are extroverted, intuitive, thinking, and judgmental. From this, can you tell me what type of whisky a CIA spy would like? What you describe—I'm not sure on what basis they're judging intuitive thinking, for example, which is not strictly a personality trait, but roughly speaking I would say that probably somebody like that is going to prefer—according to the algorithm—something sweet, fruity, and mellow. But it would depend on whether the extroversion is their strongest trait or just one amongst several of their traits. The algorithm does different things depending on what the pattern of traits is.

Thanks for speaking with us, Dr. Moore.